xAPI 101

Editor's Notes

1. SCORM is just fine if everything you need to learn and track can be housed in your LMS. And you only learn when you’re connected to the internet and logged into the LMS.
2. I like to think of it as a grammar
3. Welcome to your new job. You’ve been hired into Company A or Company B. Which new hire onboarding would you rather have? Company A’s approach works when you’ve got a large number of people you care about tracking. It doesn’t work so well if you want them to do too much in their first 2 weeks on the job – they’re just sitting and “being trained” … they’re not doing. If you can just pour knowledge into heads, this works. And you can track completion rates, scores, participation, time spent in training – you know these raw stats at any point in time. That’s the beauty of your LMS. Company A’s approach assumes that everything you need to learn can be done inside the LMS, or at least in a classroom where the instructor records your participation in the LMS. Company B’s approach is a much more action-focused, experienced based way to learn. This is way more interesting, and way more effective. It works when you’re small – you don’t have a lot of people, you don’t care about tracking really carefully … because typically you can’t track this much stuff, this much variety, at scale … not without a lot of brute force programming. And that doesn’t give you much flexibility. So which one is better?
4. Welcome to your new job. You’ve been hired into Company A or Company B. Which new hire onboarding would you rather have? Company A’s approach works when you’ve got a large number of people you care about tracking. It doesn’t work so well if you want them to do too much in their first 2 weeks on the job – they’re just sitting and “being trained” … they’re not doing. If you can just pour knowledge into heads, this works. And you can track completion rates, scores, participation, time spent in training – you know these raw stats at any point in time. That’s the beauty of your LMS. Company A’s approach assumes that everything you need to learn can be done inside the LMS, or at least in a classroom where the instructor records your participation in the LMS. Company B’s approach is a much more action-focused, experienced based way to learn. This is way more interesting, and way more effective. It works when you’re small – you don’t have a lot of people, you don’t care about tracking really carefully … because typically you can’t track this much stuff, this much variety, at scale … not without a lot of brute force programming. And that doesn’t give you much flexibility. So which one is better?
5. Finbert the Gnome
6. what we pitched to BadBoy re: FAR regulations, ePub-It
7. John Crane
8. Altair
9. Lets go back to that structured/unstructured concept that Megan talked about.. Databases like to be neat and tidy.. A place for everything and everything has a place. But we really can’t create a place for *anything*..
10. So xAPI is “unstructured” but not “illogical”… We don’t NEED a course loaded in the system to understand data.. We don’t need to know ahead of time you’re going to send something. This is an incredibly freeing concept – and one that throws a lot more onerous on ISD’s (I think that’s the right term?) to think about their data. We haven’t really had to do that before!