Better Statements with Experience API (xAPI) Profiles
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Russell Duhon, an expert in xAPI and author of the xAPI profiles specification, offers consulting on xAPI implementations and data visualization. He highlights the need for clear guidance on recording statements and the advantages of joining a community of practice to avoid reinventing similar concepts. The new xAPI profiles are designed to improve statement consistency and enable effective data querying by establishing structured relationships and guidelines for using specific verbs and activity types.
Better Statements with Experience API (xAPI) Profiles
- 1. Better Statements with xAPI Profiles
- 2. First, me. My name is Russell Duhon. I wrote Wax LRS, the first production ready Learning Record Store, with which I helped many large and small companies do xAPI implementations. I’ve been involved in xAPI since early on, helped write the main specification, and am the primary author of the xAPI Profiles spec. I’m now an independent consultant. I help companies understand how to work with xAPI (& xAPI Profiles) from strategy to technical implementations, and with data/analytics/visualization (learning & otherwise) generally. You can reach me at [email protected], or @fugu13 on twitter
- 3. Time to make a statement!
- 4. • Okay, so I’m trying to record data about someone watching a video… what should I record? • What events should cause me to send statements? • Okay, I picked an event… what’s the right verb, here? • Do I need to use an Activity Type? • …should I be putting anything in Context?
- 5. Luckily, there’s a Community of Practice for Video
- 6. Communities of Practice are Good • Bring together people interested in similar areas • Author guidelines for people trying to write statements related to those areas • Build a body of knowledge based on real-world implementations
- 7. But most statement guidance is sparse, hard to follow, or takes a very long time to write
- 8. –Fictitious but Very Realistic member of a Community of Practice “What does it mean to describe how to use Statements?!”
- 9. In Practice • Lots of reinventing very similar concepts (“what’s a session?”), and ending up with numerous minor variations • No way for computers to “read” the rules a CoP comes up with and provide assistance • Very few CoPs have even reached sufficiently detailed guidance on Statements for implementers to follow them consistently
- 10. And that’s why the ADL commissioned a specification for xAPI Profiles
- 11. Profiles Community Process • Run by DISC • Gathered input from LRS providers, companies using xAPI, researchers, instructional designers, and many more • Regular meetings with a number of people heavily involved in the xAPI space
- 12. The new xAPI Profiles help CoPs say… • What new verbs are we introducing? • What extensions are we introducing? • When should you use all this stuff? • What *exactly* do statements using these things “the right way” look like? • What order should I send them? • How do processing systems know I’m using this profile? • And rather a lot of other things
- 13. The new xAPI Profiles are structured… • So computers can work with them • So people can query repositories with them to find out exactly what they want to know • To express *relationships* between concepts, so both people and analytic systems can tell, for example, that “medaling” in a sporting event, as defined by a particular (currently fictional) xAPI CoP, is a more specific concept completely contained within the idea of “placing”
- 14. Anatomy of a Profile
- 15. Concepts are Building Blocks • Verbs, Activity Types, and Attachment Usage Types are specific things/categories of things that relate to each other taxonomically—hierarchies and so forth. • Extensions are extra pieces of data that can be included, with rules on what they’re allowed/supposed to look like. • Document resources are similarly flexible pieces of data, but they don’t go in Statements, and can include a lot more than JSON. • Activities are just that, canonical forms of specific Activities. Imagine the Red Cross first aid certifications.
- 16. Anyone writing Statements can use Concepts independently
- 17. Statement Templates & Patterns • Describe how to communicate the very specific things *this* Profile has standardized, using combinations of the Concepts from this and other Profiles. • Require the Statement creator “buy in” by putting the Profile (version)’s ID (the Profile is an Activity!) in the Context. • Let the Profile lay down detailed rules on what goes in the Statement, what order Statements go in, that sort of thing, either required or suggested.
- 18. Resources • https://github.com/adlnet/xapi-profiles (start with xapi- profiles-about.md and the meaty parts are mostly in xapi- profiles-structure.md) • https://github.com/adlnet/xapi-authored-profiles has first drafts of some Profiles from a variety of CoPs—still being refined
- 19. Questions? If you think of any later, you can reach me at [email protected], or @fugu13 on twitter