xAPI (Experience API) is a new protocol for measuring people's learning progress.
xAPIs are an important new opportunity that e-learning platforms enable!
The Experience API is an e-learning software specification that allows content and learning systems to communicate with each other so that all types of learning experiences can be recorded and tracked.
(by Wikipedia)
What does it mean?
Today we live in a world where each of us has digital experiences that are more varied than the traditional experience of taking a course and having a final test at the end of this course.
In reality we live experiences of visiting social networks on mobile, or we use an augmented reality app, or a virtual reality app and all these digital elements with which we interface make us live experiences.
So it was clear that a new standard would need to be developed to measure this experience. It is no longer sufficient as it was in the past with the SCORM standard to have a grade from 0 to 10, from 0 to 100 or to pass or fail the exam.
In reality xAPI allows you to track the experience.
Technically it is based on communicating sentences that are composed of a subject, a verb and a direct object.
So “I’m Roberto and maybe in my experience Roberto visited the virtual place and Roberto collected the correct object for example in a gamification. Roberto made the wrong choice and he made the right choice only the second time.“
All these sentences are measurable via the XAPI protocol. This creates a gap between those programs that can manage these new modalities and those that are not yet ready.
An important criterion of choice today if you face a digital transformation of training is clearly to choose an e-learning platform that is able to read these experiences.
As you can see in the image below for example in the case of the program ILIAS Open Source it is possible to read the external server from the external application via the X API protocol this is Learning Experience which obviously represents a much more complete heritage of what we do in the digital world compared to a simple final evaluation of a course.
