 I'm Sushe Fontinaufer, I'm technical director at Leo Learning and today I'm presenting together with my colleague Mark Abadou. In all fairness, most credits of the preparation of this presentation goes entirely to Mark. Today we're going to be talking about Moodle and the XAPI and primarily in terms of the journey of XAPI and where we are today. So we're going to start off by talking about what is XAPI, then we're going to take you through the XAPI history, focusing on standards, industry and Moodle itself and then where next for XAPI and Moodle. So this is an introduction to XAPI, I'm not sure of everyone, should we do a quick show of hands, see who does know what XAPI is and it's a bit hard to see, about half or so, 40%. So this is kind of a simplistic overview I guess, but it was a specification that was kind of commissioned by ADL, which is the organization behind SCORM, the standards body behind SCORM, to think about what's the next generation of kind of learning technology and standards that are needed to support that. It's not the next generation of SCORM itself but it came out of that kind of project to assess that and it's really about this kind of realization that well learning happens everywhere and in all sorts of different systems in real life and not just in a piece of e-learning and how can you gather information about that and communicate it back to a central place and their terminology for that central place is the learning record store and XAPI is really the kind of mechanism, the transport mechanism really for getting details about those learner experiences into the learning record store in this statement format of active verb object, so mark completed piece of e-learning and it's that simple. So that kind of gets it down to its fundamentals really. So looking at the timeline of XAPI, we're going to start this journey in 2011 and take you through to today's date, taking you through the standards industry response to these standards and moodle. Okay so XAPI is a standard itself or I should probably call it a specification rather than a standard, some people might nitpick over that one but it came to it been in sort of development for a few years previous to this but really mid 2013 was when it reached 1.0 and really got widespread adoption and has progressed through multiple iterations since then which have been kind of refinements really. It should be viewed in the context of these other standards that are emerging as well so we've got the important one here I think in relation to XAPI is IMS caliper so there's two big standards bodies in e-learning, one is ADL which runs the SCORM and is now AICC standard came into them as well and then you've got IMS which lots of you're probably familiar with as well and IMS have started the caliper spec which has a lot of crossover with XAPI whereas XAPI is more about that kind of transport of data about learning experiences into the central learning record store and about the portability of that data into and out of different systems. Caliper is more of uses the similar act of object type mechanism but it's really a kind of an analytics framework for learning analytics about how do you describe those events. So there's a lot of crossover they borrow caliper borrows some of the XAPI specification in places and there's talk about whether those things might merge at some point and where those boundaries are between them and then we've got CMI5 as well which is important which is the next version of SCORM which again borrows from XAPI as well so it's good bits of SCORM, good bits of AICC and good bits of XAPI into a new standard called CMI5 so we've sort of put them all on the same map really because it's because of the overlaps and whether these things may come together at some point but currently we're on XAPI version 1.03 which was late last year. Moving to the industry the adapters that started to show implementation of XAPI was in August 2012 within our own group Rustacy provided support for XAPI in the SCORM engine also in August 2012 then in December of the same year there were over 40 registered LMS systems and authoring vendors using the SCORM standard then the first open source LRS so the learning record store which holds all the XAPI statements was released by learning locker in this sorry October 2013 so that was a year later in June or no sorry January of 2014 Watershed launched their LRS and Watershed is a company that came out of Rustacy followed by some major higher education adapters of XAPI through the YISC initiative around learner analytics and the system that YISC developed in collaboration with several universities and then in March 2017 the YISC learning analytics system had signed up over 40 oh no sorry 50 universities here in the UK. There's a bit of crossover I think between that that YISC platform and insight and inspire sorry it should be interesting to cover at some point in terms of where Moodle has sort of sits along these timelines of adoption it was 2013 four years ago in Dublin Moodle I think where I sort of came along to Moodle Moodle to say and try and kick start a bit of a conversation around XAPI and what what does it mean for Moodle world or it was called Tin Can API rather at the time which is kind of its working title and previous to that there's been some some noise in the tracker in Moodle tracker about it as well. So this has sort of been a conversation really that's been going on for for a number of years and in that intervening period there's been a number of plugins that have evolved so Andrew Downs is one of the first guys to kind of really crack on with this and built a launch plugin for content that had been packaged up by XAPI packages so some of the as Sasha mentioned some of the authoring tool vendors had started to offer XAPI versions of their content as well as scorn packages and the plugin Andrew wrote allowed you to launch those in Moodle and then the most significant one really is from Charity Learning Consortium CLC who built this logstore XAPI plugin for Moodle which is in the these are all in Moodle plugins database and and that takes it's kind of interacts with the Moodle events log and which are kind of in XAPI format anyway you know it's it's you know user X completed activity Y that's all there in the event logs and and that that XAPI plugin just converts that into the exact right sort of statement format that's needed to hook up to an external learning record store and shortly after that Blackboards then reused that and extended it towards Caliper as well I think their plugins supports both XAPI and Caliper so there's been some good work there and those are those are quite widely used plugins and then finally I can't quite read on that the Moodle tracker item so that's just worth noting there that log into the tracker now if you can and it needs 10 more votes and it will become the number one most requested feature in the Moodle in the Moodle tracker so there's there's some real support out in the community to get that into Moodle core. So where next for XAPI and Moodle? The XAPI and Moodle core would be nice XAPI and Caliper both supported by plugins to some extent need to move into Moodle core enable both inward and outward data i.e. the interoperability between Moodle and other systems to support data portability required by the XAPI statement. A note on standards development as well which I think is important to consider as if we're having that conversation about whether XAPI and Caliper come into Moodle core this whole issue of understanding well what are the boundaries between these two specifications and are they going to merge maybe at some point there was a lot of activity in the second half of last year between IMS and the ADL bodies and a bunch of other industry sort of interested parties to really explore where the overlap is between these two specifications and should they converge or should they remain separate and what are the differences and the values in each one so how do you select which you need and which you merge into core. I think from discussions with HQ there's some interest in having both of these in Moodle core which I guess is where LMSs will go. I've put a few bullets here on what are the broad differences but I think the main thing to remember is the Calipers the kind of the framework for defining events for learning analytics brought really for building learning analytics programs around it whereas XAPI is more about that communication layer so how do you get things in and out of the system and making sure that data is portable and earlier discussion around the learning analytics piece this morning was around users owning their data and XAPI kind of allows that because you should always be able to take your data out of the learning record store and take it with you and move it somewhere else if you wish to as a learner not just as a system builder and then CMI5 which I mentioned earlier being the next generation of SCORN which kind of overlaps with a lot of this stuff and again needs to be considered as to whether that becomes into Moodle as well. Learning analytics if Moodle is the analytics platform then use of XAPI to import learning experiences data from outside the LMS it becomes a question also it it grows in need to push XAPI data from Moodle into other learning analytics platforms GISC learning analytics platform is an example there's a few other ones out there we mentioned watershed earlier there's another one called Yeti. Okay we tried to think about where there's all this this kind of fit with there's a lot of talk within within our sector in workplace learning about learning ecosystems and people conducting their learning in lots of different systems lots of different places as I mentioned that which XAPI kind of supports that model and we tried to sort of represent that visually as to what's our view of a learning ecosystem in the corporate world and and where does kind of Moodle sit within that we've I know this is quite small to see we've done this up as a poster so it's outside this room in the in the poster area if you want to have a closer look but we try to represent that visually and and outline in blue the areas that Moodle does at the moment as as core and the the yellow blobs as as fits that can be extended using plugins and in the middle there you've got the learning record store you've got the event log hence that piece bleep being blue but that can be extended with the XAPI login plugin and so on to so those are there in yellow and these other sort of gray areas which are just other you know areas of learning that we have to work with with our customers but don't really sit within the Moodle kind of sphere and we very much see XAPI as the kind of enabler for kind of hook in all of these types of experiences together which is what we're trying to represent in that diagram so we will we shall hang around our poster in the next break I think and if anyone wants to come and have a closer look and have a chat please please feel free digitizing the HE content is from my personal experience with with higher education always quite a contingent's topic mainly because it quite quickly attends to generate whether it generally a lot of costs associated with generating the content but growth of digital content repositories is definitely a given given fact impact on course authoring analytics and recommendations is changing its landscapes and we feel that XAPI definitely has got quite a big role to play in that space in terms of universities adopting the SCORM standard and the XAPI standard that is slowly emerging as well you've got for example Leeds Metropolitan University who's dipping their toes into building more interactive type of learning materials using Moodle and using SCORM to deliver those experience to to their users to their students another university in Europe that is a big player using the SCORM standard is the medical university in grass and there is definitely space in terms of designing and creating more interactive learning experiences using XAPI or any of the other previously mentioned standards going forward so do we have any questions for Mark or Sasha yep anything I mean one one of the thoughts that I was having was you're talking about getting it into core the XAPI stuff a lot of people will be wanting to do learning analytics and wanted to use XAPI and is well developing their own thing now already as well just trying to put more pressure on the core to get that in in terms of the getting getting that data out of Moodle XAPI login plugin or the Blackboard plugin as well both good solutions just extract all that data quite easily using an industry standard that can that could work with you know the JISC system or or the Inspire or whatever any of these other commercial LRSs or the open source one that we mentioned you know there's a handful of commercial LRSs that have come onto the market so and they're all sort of pitching themselves as learning analytics products and XAPI is really the kind of the mechanism to get data out. Thank you. Oh we have one more. I was just gonna say we're one of the institutions that is working with with the JISC in terms of their learning analytics projects so we've been working with the XAPI plugin and stuff like that and I just wanted to reinforce that I think it is actually becoming a really sort of useful even plugin in the minute for doing exactly that sort of stuff and there's been some interest envelopes with them you know getting into batching that's for the data quality and the streaming stuff so it's certainly becoming a really sort of interesting and quite feasible tool for it so definitely it's worth looking at. Hey this is kind of a lazy question on my part but over the years I've read and heard quite a lot of sort of vague and theoretical stuff about XAPI that you can see why in principle it might be good but I was wondering if you could tell us a short but very specific example where someone has done something with XAPI to track some learning that really made a difference and couldn't have been done before. Is that? With emphasis on chart. I think that there's a good example with the water shares team which have to make a disclaimer because LTG are parent groups and investor in them but they've done some work they're American based and they've done some nice work with I can't remember the organisation name but it's they do training for first responders in the US for emergency situations and they they managed they used XAPI to to a track all their learning but also track sort of incident response times and and and whether the learning had an impact on not just response times but but in people who've had cardiac arrest I think it was in in their revival rates and I was sure that's the right term for it but and and they were able to approve just through merging all of this data together into a learning record store using that the XAPI is the standard to do so that there was possibly positive impact between the learning of the training of those first responders and the results that they were getting in the field. Thank you. Thank you.