Introduction to the xAPI Cohort, by Torrance Learning, and to one of the projects in the Spring 2018 “semester”: xAPI and Instructor-Led Training. With an interactive video! (It is recommended to read the article first to get the context, but if you want you may jump directly to the interactive video) Twice a year, in the Spring and in the Fall, Torrance Learning organizes the xAPI Cohort. It is a learning initiative in which participants freely form groups of interest around various xAPI-related topics.
Sometimes the wording used to describe xAPI portray it as something that it’s not. This can a source of confusion. Read on to find out why. Sometimes introductory texts about xAPI do say that it is a specification, but later talk about it as if it were a system, a piece of software that does something. xAPI is not a software system. It is a specification for an API. So, it is a document, a set of rules, that tell programmers certain things that they need to implement in their systems.
The experience API (xAPI) was released on April 2013, so it is now in its 4th year of life. However, it is rather easy to run into information that doesn’t really clarify some of the key aspects of xAPI, because it is innacurate or misleading. This series tries to address some of those areas of confusion. More than a year ago, frustrated by some ideas I kept seeing in introductory articles to xAPI, I published the article xAPI has great potential, but it is not magic!