Learning, Technology and the Experience API
There are few things society values more than education. For centuries we’ve discussed, debated and fought over the best ways to educate youth as a means of progressing ourselves from one generation to the next. For a long time education was exclusive to the privileged top-tiers of society, but the industrial and digital revolutions enabled a rapid diffusion of learning to the masses.
Technology, in its many forms, has often been used to facilitate this. Often-times technology’s ability to scale education has the effect of turning back on itself and fundamentally changing methods of education. The Internet enabled online education which led first to asynchronous learning (a method that facilitates information sharing outside of the constraints of time and place among a network of people), and then progressed, through increases in computing power and speed, to enable a return to synchronous learning (where a group of students and teachers are engaging in learning at the same time).
A huge portion of learning delivery has now been pushed online, especially at the tertiary level. The management of learning, however, is now processed substantially online in the developing world. One could argue that technology has enabled us to capture a vast amount of information about students in a more granular form than was ever able offline, but many critics still point to the shortcomings of really understanding the full learning experience of a person.
Historically, a number of e-learning standards have been developed including AICC, IMS and LTI. However the defacto standard for web-based educational technology is SCORM. For years now there have been calls for a big step forward in capturing learning information, however this required a paradigm shift – which came in 2013 with the development of the Experience API (originally known as Tin Can API and often referred to now simply as xAPI).
Competency tracking vs experience tracking
The philosophy behind SCORM largely came from the same philosophy that guided offline education, namely that a learner could be judged by the quality and quantity of finished actions, whether these actions comprised parts or the whole of some form of accreditation. This was powered through SCORM’s use of metadata in handling web-based content and events.
The thinking was to essentially categorise and sub-categorise formal learning depending on the level of granularity to be captured. Most educators now agree that at least 70% of all learning occurs informally – in what you could call the ‘experience zone’. The US Department of Defense (through its Advanced Distributive Learning standards body) recognised this shortcoming in 2010 and awarded a contract to Rustici Software to research and define a new standard, which they did a year later.
The Experience API uses an Actor:Verb:Object-style statement written in simple code. This simplicity allows for all sorts of different ways of capturing learning events – for example, replace Actor:Verb:Object with John:Read:ATrainingManual, or Stacey:Created:CampaignArtwork. This is a radical advance towards truly understanding the learnt value of a person. As if this isn’t enough, there are further revolutionary benefits built into the xAPI.
User-Owned Data
With nearly all records regarding learning competencies and experiences now in a data format, numerous approaches have emerged to manage this, based primarily on which education provider is providing the learning and which system is being used to manage the learner’s records. Different learning/training/student management systems approach handling records with conflicting, often incompatible methods. The outcome of this is that moving learner records between education providers and/or organisation’s LMSs is either difficult or simply not cost-justifiable.
xAPI incorporates a concept called a Learning Record Store (LRS) which operates independently from any particular learning management system (although an LMS can also incorporate an LRS) and provides a common framework for how this learner data is created, managed, stored and accessed. There are many significant benefits from using an LRS. Firstly, data can be synched between multiple LRSs in circumstances where people’s learning is being managed across multiple systems (for example where a university student is also undergoing learning on-the-job). In the future, learners themselves will have access to their own LRS or ‘personal data locker’, allowing them to have the ownership and control of the information in their learning journey.
Secondly, a common method for holding student data facilitates common methods for analysis. Perhaps a student prefers audio-only learning to audio-visual, or requires short bursts of intense content rather than a more paced approach. In the future we will see more sophisticated methods of analysing and understanding different learning patterns, much like the way Google Analytics has created a standard way of measuring web activity and modelling web-use behaviour. This will provide educators with powerful feedback not only for enhancing the effectiveness of the learning experience but also for tailoring learning processes to the unique needs and preferences of learners.
Another key benefit is that the method of using an ‘experience’ allows virtually anything to be entered into the LRS as an element of learning, whether that be the watching of a YouTube video by the learner, interacting with mobile games or even online social interactions, all of which may contribute to both informal and formal (even accredited) learning.
Finally, this new technology will not only allow organisations to gain a much clearer understanding of an employees L&D profile prior to hiring, but will also enable a much greater ability to correlate learning activities and experience with job outcomes. For organisations, this is the end game: optimising learning effectiveness to optimise employee performance.
Social and Mobile Data
The social and mobile revolutions in turn (and together) have changed most industries, especially education. Blackboard and other LMS providers have been quick to create mobile applications to allow learners to access content wherever they are, and have built in functionality to allow learner-to-learner conversations to occur. At a higher level, Facebook has been slowly encroaching on the traditional news distribution business with providers like BuzzFeed and the Economist now seeing a large part of their readership accessing their content through their websites.
This kind of information diffusion is ideal for LRS capture. Besides reading content, people in the developed world spend an enormous amount of time on social-media platforms, with many of their interactions (think editing a picture, debating a cause, planning an event) falling into the realm of ‘learning experiences’. All these interactions are already being tracked rigorously by the platforms themselves via ‘activity streams’ for UI design choices and advertising, so the move to track social learning in an LRS via Tin Can API statements is relatively straight forward.
The Future of Learning
The biggest ‘if’ surround xAPI right now is one of adoption. A standard is only as good as the organisations choosing to use it. Given that the same organisation that was responsible for SCORM is behind xAPI, this shouldn’t really be considered an ‘if’, more of a ‘when’. Many predict 2016 to be the year of xAPI.
The second biggest question is in how a company’s right to privacy and a student’s right to their own learner data is handled. Consider, for example, the predicament that would occur if there were numerous records in a learner’s LRS (linked to an internal company LMS) concerning a secret R&D project that hadn’t yet been released. If the employee left the company should they have the right to take this information with them?
The final question is to what extent the concept of an LRS becomes native to applications. As mentioned before, society values education above nearly most other things. The rise of xAPI mirrors the rise of analytics in general across Internet-connected applications. It’s not impossible to envision a scenario where virtually every kind of web and mobile application comes standard with LRS tracking capability built in – imagine perhaps one of the default steps when setting up a new smart phone being ‘Would you like to input your LRS ID now so activity can be captured?’ Needless to say there will be exciting things ahead for learners, learning providers, organisations and learning technology providers that get a head-start on xAPI.