Experience API
Introduction
According to ADL (retrieved June 2016) “The Experience API (xAPI) is an open source specification that allows you to track any experience (i.e., formal, informal, or operational). xAPI can track reading an article or interacting with an eBook, watching a training video, chatting with a mentor, physiological measures such as heart-rate data, quiz scores, and answer history by question.”. According to a more recent definition (retrieved April 2019), the “Experience API (xAPI) is a technical specification that aims to facilitate the documentation and communication of learning experiences. It specifies a structure to describe learning experiences and defines how these descriptions can be exchanged electronically.”. In more simple terms, the XAPI allows tracking of online student activities in various environments . It stores the data in a special purpose database - a socalled Learning Record Store - from which it then can be retrieved for various purposes, e.g. student monitoring or institutional learning analytics. Ex
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Goals and components
According the official developer home page on Github (retrieved April 2019), the goals of the xAPI are:
- To make it easier to understand and compare learning experiences and their outcomes recorded across a wide variety of contexts, platforms and technologies.
- To maximize interoperability of services which create, gather, store and process information about learning experiences.
- To provide a guide to those who want to build applications that conform to and implement this specification.
- To provide criteria against which conformance to this specification can be tested.
The API includes three major components:
- Tracking Experiences
- Activity Data and Metadata
- Agent and Persona Management
Tracking experiences
The following figure defines how learner experience is tracked
![](/mediawiki/images/thumb/5/5d/XAPIDataFlow.jpg/800px-XAPIDataFlow.jpg)
A learner has a learning experience. This experience could take place in an online course, it could be on the job or it could be part of recreation. It really could be anything. This experience is tracked, on the learner’s behalf, by a trusted Learning Record Provider (LRP). The Learning Record Provider can also be responsible for the trusted relationship between the experience and the learner. This might even include launching content for the learner and managing digital rights associated with the content.
The Learning Record Provider creates Learning Records and sends them to one or more Learning Record Stores (LRSs). The LRS stores the Learning Records and makes them available to any authorized Client. A Learning Record Consumer (LRC) is a type of Client that accesses Learning Records and makes use of them.(xAPI-About (retrieved April 2019).
Acknowledgement and copyright
A large part of contents from Experience API specification licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0. In short, you can reuse the reused material in any way if you cite the original Experience API source.