 Sorry, my name is Dennis Hall. So we're going to get directly into the presentation as soon as I've just finished a brief introduction of my background. Can you hear that OK? OK. All right, so I've been working in learning and development in the learning and development industry since 1981. So yeah, I'm old. OK, bottom line, I'm just old. But I'm young at heart. I started focusing on electronic classrooms. In 1997, when I started working remotely, running around the United States primarily, and I found Kinkos was just ridiculous in price. Every week I was spending thousands of dollars at Kinkos, printing five inch and three and a half inch binders. So I decided to put everything on CD-ROM and do it all electronically. And I also decided to just publish everything as HTML and make it more interactive for my students. I was lugging around a traveling classroom in big black boxes everywhere. They would fly in cargo. I would sometimes fly with them, I guess. I got tired of traveling. So in 1999, I devised this plan to, hey, why not do everything over the internet? And conduct learning management and all that. So I created this silly little portal. And these were technicians that I was training, telephone technicians. And I had to teach them how to install computer networks and install software and configure. So yeah, so basically I started evolving my classrooms from binders to CD-ROMs, which were filled with HTML files and basically a little intranet on the CD-ROMs. I then discovered this thing called learning management where I could actually start pulling information about what my students were doing. And that was quite critical because from a learning and development perspective, I kind of needed to know what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong in the content that I developed. And that really helped me fine tune what I was developing for the students. I discovered, for example, that many of my students were retiring bell technicians. And these were guys that punched wires all the time. They didn't install computer networks, hook up telephony systems into the networks, that sort of thing. So I started to evolve my training as a result of learning management data that I was receiving. So finally, in 2009, I got tired of traveling. And I quit my job. And I started working here in Montreal for a learning management system development company. It was named Strategia. It no longer exists. PeopleSoft bought them out. And they're very successful with that system that they had purchased when they bought them out. I then developed just a couple of years ago, I started thinking, well, the mobile world is coming out. And there's this thing called the Experience API. The Experience API is essentially a specification, is all it really is, but there is a technology behind it, of course, but it runs on standardized protocols, standardized internet technology. And a really key thing is, it allows you to track anything that you want to track relative to the students' learning. They might be on their cell phone and they might be standing at the top of Mount Everest, offline, okay? Obviously, there's no Wi-Fi up there. And cellular's probably not that good up there. I don't know, personally, but the bottom line is there might be a task that you've got them, that you want them to do. And it involves standing at the peak of Mount Everest on a certain time and day and pushing a button on their cell phone in an app, even when they're offline. You know, a silly example, but an extreme one, obviously. But guess what? That works. That'll work. They can then come down with their cell phone off Mount Everest and they can reconnect to the internet and it will synchronize what they did, when they did it, where they were, what altitude they were, everything. So that might be a skill that was just proven. The skill was, I can climb Mount Everest. The competency was, I stayed alive doing it, okay? So I developed this non-wordpress LMS that was mobile first, not necessarily purely mobile, but mobile first. I called it XAPI LMS. I then started getting requests from, it was a multi-organizational LMS. So people in many franchises of restaurant chains and stuff could have their own personal version of that LMS, including uploading their personal logo, uploading their own people, managing their own people, even, what do you call it? Promoting people within the LMS to become a hire manager or that sort of thing. And that was all fine, that's all good. But the deal is it was purely XAPI. It did not use any WordPress-related technology. Even the database wasn't compatible, but I did manage to make it work with WooCommerce because I had started having requests that people would like to manage to resell their courses to multiple organizations. So in WordPress, in WooCommerce, I created a form system that allowed an organization to be created, allowed them to upload their users. They didn't upload into WordPress though. They uploaded from WordPress into this other LMS that I'd created. So it was rather interesting, people liked it a lot and I trashed it after that because I liked WordPress better. I seriously did, it was really the reason. I then focused on e-learning ecosystems because I had realized that, hey, I could integrate all this stuff. I mean, I just did it, right? That was a form of integration. Having a WooCommerce purchase, a bulk purchase, write a bunch of people's data to some other system, somewhere else. The only limitation at that time, because I was learning, was that I kept it all in the same server. So it had to be a custom built server. I wanted to get away from that and more into the mainstream. So I started working on WordPress stuff. I then, in the last year, I've started to develop my own learning management system, which is not yet available on the market. It's not yet completed being built. And that's all I'll say about that. So I'm also a contributing member to a few of the US Department of Defense learning specifications. ADL is the, in America, there's two acronyms for ADL. One is the Anti-Defamation League, which is anti-racist and that sort of thing. The other one is the Advanced Distributed Learning. Okay, so that's the one I'm part of. So ADL XAPI specification is one of the specifications out on the internet. I won't get into the details of the specification quite yet. I'm just gonna give you some very high level information, which really is quite critical, especially for those of you who may have been in this industry for quite a while now. I'm also a contributing author, in each case, I'm a contributing author, by the way, of the CMI-5 specification. CMI is a old standard for developing e-learning, just so you know, it's an old specification. But version five of it is the learning management system itself it deals with. So you have this thing called the XAPI. It lets you do things like have your cell phone on the top of Mount Everest, click a button and come back, right? CMI-5 allows the learning management system that same authority. And it allows the learning management system to recognize that somebody who wasn't logged in was up on the top of Mount Everest, click in a button and then reconnecting. So it synchronizes all of that information. So CMI-5 is like a layer on top, another specification that adds a profile to the XAPI-1. CAS is another specification. Who is, in this room, who all is, does anything in the learning and development world? Put up your hand. So none of you work in learning and development at all? E-learning? Okay. So CAS is a specification related to competencies. So to just step back a little bit, when you want to get a new job in your company, okay? Let's say right now you're a manager or yeah, you're a manager and you wanna become a director. So what has to happen is the human resources department has to identify that your skills, your abilities and your attitude are all related, are all good for you to become a director before you can actually become that. Those are called KSI's. So CAS is the competency side of this. A competency is basically saying, I am capable of doing this and here's the proof of it. Here's the standard that proves that I can do it. So if you give somebody the standard and say, Dennis, go ahead and prove you did it, I should be able to repeat my process within that standard and pass. So that's called a competency. It's a proven competency at that point. CAS is a specification related to these competencies. So if any of this interests you, we're going to have a lot of time to chat after this presentation and I'm happy to take questions. We've got a second microphone here just for all of you. All right, so let's get into WordPress and the learning ecosystem. How WordPress can become part of this greater system. All right, so what is the learning ecosystem? It's a collection of ways that people learn. It's not a technical thing. It's how you learn, okay? That's one part of it. So how you learn, you learn in different places like the top of Mount Everest, okay? You learn with different systems like your mobile device or a computer or a laptop or whatever it be, a tablet. You also learn while attending meetings or attending conferences at WordCamp. Okay, so right now, if I could record what all of you are doing, my learning management system would basically say, everybody here, it would have a record saying, I did this, I attended WordCamp, okay? And that's kind of how the Experience API works. It talks about your experiential information, not the technical side like I attended WordCamp, yeah, but I got 18%, we don't care about that part, okay? It also, so your tools are there and where you learned from and such are all there and how you learned. The learning management system then takes that information and turns that into performance criteria. Now, there's two types of systems that can output that kind of information. There's a reporting system, which basically is the one that says, Dennis got 60% on the exam. But then there's other systems that can take the global data like everybody in this group and basically give it statistical analysis that says Dennis gave a good or poor presentation because everybody's got bored during it or they were all excited during it or they all just sat there staring saying nothing. Okay, so it includes the different places and the results created and stored and how they're used. So the perfect system, okay? People learn from different sources. We need to capture that as I was just saying in reporting and analytics by the way, which was that statistical part I was talking about. And XAPI specification allows for all of this because it collects a ton of data. It collects as much or as little as you want. So the experience API or XAPI, which by the way is also known as its original project name called Tin Can for any of you who've ever been interested in this. It's a new specification that makes the learning technology work well together. It basically in a nutshell, it takes what you've done, stores it in a database and then allows other systems to retrieve the information and run analytics on it and reporting. But what's really key about it? Has anybody ever tried to do this kind of thing already in WordPress? Put up your hand. Anybody tried to store information in WordPress and then retrieve it in some other system? Yeah, it probably took a lot. Did it take a developer to help you out? Was it expensive? Yeah, XAPI reduces those costs and the specific skill set required for the developer a whole lot, a whole lot. It's a much more cost and human resources effective solution. And because it's standardized, all of those systems can talk the same way with it. And it doesn't take a whole heck of a lot to allow that to happen as far as resources and money. So the learning management system basically has traditionally been the area that things have been stored, like in WordPress. If you save some data in WordPress, it saves it to the local database and then you can retrieve it. Learning management systems, even in WordPress, are no different. There's no difference whatsoever. What XAPI does is it allows you to store the data outside WordPress, okay? Into a common server that all of the other servers can use. And that's purely, for the most part, a database server with a standardized connection that talks to any different system through a standardized methodology, which is the XAPI specification methodology. After that, you want that learning management system to be able to get you promoted to the director, right? So whatever you did and got recorded in a learning management system, that should be information that should help your human resources department make a decision about you. So the fact that you took the course, you passed the exam, you proved a competency, you were able to attend the meeting or you were able to hold a meeting that had tangible results, okay? That's a really good competency to earn. So now your human resources department wants to know about it. Well, if we only looked at the yellow bubble, if we only kept things in the learning management system, human resources has to call your boss and go and get your records and yada, yada, and they've got to import, export it to Excel or whatever, get it into the HRIS system, yada, yada. XAPI can do it directly and live. It can do it the second it happens. Technically, the nanosecond it happens. And it can distribute your information to all those systems simultaneously. So that's kind of powerful. And by the way, one more little thing, it doesn't matter what domain name those other systems are in, it's cross domain compatible. So then, in this case, I've got a project planning scenario going on here. So obviously what's going on is somebody had a project management meeting, they determined the people they needed with the skill sets they needed, and they wanted to get a short list of what people were available to populate those positions for that project as soon as possible. And if they're not available, when will they be available? Well, the LMS can tell them all that stuff. If there are certifications required for people to fulfill a position, number one, when can that person fill the position? Are they already certified? If they are certified, when are they going to lose that certification and have to recertify? There's all kinds of things. And that's a dashboard scenario. There are companies here in Montreal that use these dashboards very, very effectively. They're in the aerospace industry. And those are $150,000 per year systems. Okay, we're talking WordPress here at this point. We're talking you as the individual could actually manage and even purchase this kind of, or even pay for these kind of services at a very low cost. Now, whether you're an individual or an organization, it's still the same standard. It's still the same product. So you're getting some pretty industrial strength stuff for a very, very cost effective solution. So now we get into the production. So production reveals that, although it was a great project plan, there's a flaw in what we're doing. So how can we fix that? How can we identify the flaw to begin with? How can we fix it? Is it personnel related or is it a machine related flaw? Do we have a robot putting IC chips backwards on the PC board? Well, is it the person that programmed the robot? So we need to look at the skills involved in the human resources related to that. By doing that, it allows us to fine tune the process even after the project's moving forward. And believe it or not, XAPI can contribute to that as well. From your learning records, it can tie it all together. And this is the whole idea. So then finally, you know, whatever the resulting solution is, it's done. And the cycle continues again to further fine tune things. Are there any questions at this point? Hello, hello, please. Welcome to record of people being recorded having learned. How exactly does this apply to the new European GDPR regulations? Is this something that affects XAPI? Yeah, no, very good question. I was going to incorporate GDPR into this conversation or into this meeting. However, I was originally told that there was already a conference on that. And I would recommend you attend that for best details. But what I can tell you is that in fact, here, I'll give, I'm going to describe it using our scenarios here in Canada. I'm from British Columbia originally. I moved here to Quebec because I married a French girl. You never go where your parents are. So in British Columbia, if I wanted to set up a scenario where I stored my data in Google, and I used to work for Google, so I know this by the way, because I used to have to deal with that at the enterprise level. If I wanted to store my data in Google, I would end up not knowing if my data was stored in British Columbia, Alberta, or the US. And that was a big deal. Google lost a number of customers because of that. At that time, they may have resolved all of this since. So what's important about this is, and the reason I'm going into where the data is stored, that's kind of part of GDPR to an extent. Understand GDPR is an EU specification. And we're certainly going to adopt it. I guarantee it's going to happen. At their beginning. Oh, that they have, no, a month ago, they announced that they were going to do it. Yeah, you're right, I remember that. So what's important about this is California, Europe, if your data is being stored somewhere, it's got to be stored within that GDPR area. It can't be stored in the US to be GDPR compliant. Furthermore, when you remove that data, as you're probably aware, because you're aware of that GDPR compliance, when you remove the data by request of the user or however it occur, the data has to actually be completely removed. So what's important about a learning record or about XAPI, I'm going to say, is that XAPI, all the data is stored in a place of your choice. That place can be a local server. That place can be in the US on the cloud. It's your choice. So you have control over all the GDPR aspects. Now, how you implement GDPR, I'll let you decide that when you go to that conference, but the bottom line is, you know where your data is being stored. I can tell you firsthand, all the data that I store is sitting in Seattle, Washington. All the data. None of my data is ever stored anywhere except Seattle, Washington. So, and that's a cloud provider. But because my server is sitting in Seattle, Washington, I have 13 virtual private servers, by the way. And because one of the server that I keep my data on is sitting in Seattle, I know that. And I can tell my customers that, who purchased my products and everything. I can tell them your data is only sitting in Seattle. All right, so all of the stuff I'm discussing, that server I was just talking about, that stores the data is called an LRS. Don't confuse it with an LMS. The LMS is the learning management system. The LRS is the learning records store. And the objective again, is to have one central system that is allowed to communicate with any other system, no matter what domain they're in or anything. So you don't have cross domain problems as far as retrieving data, storing data, et cetera. And you don't even need an LMS to actually store data for that guy that was on the top of Mount Everest. He's gonna store his data directly into the LRS, not even the LMS. So he doesn't even have to log in. So I've just described the LMS, the LRS, again, as I've just described it all, it is its own server and common to all the other servers. Your business systems talk to the LRS, not to the LMS. The LMS talks to the LRS, your business systems talk to the LRS, your production, your project management, all those different systems talk to the LRS. And they get all their data from that as well. I described dashboards a little while ago, how, as an example, one aviation company that I know of here in Montreal, there's actually two that I know of. Honestly, I used to work for one of them. These companies pay huge sums of money every year. And by the way, they maintain server farms for their data, okay? This is another thing with the LRS. You can turn it into a server farm, it takes about three minutes to do it. Else, you can just expand the same server and performance is very good. LRS's send and receive very, very small amounts of data, very small. I have thousands of users on one of mine and I don't even get to 10% monthly bandwidth on it. And they're constantly going. So we have reports, which I've described earlier, and we have analytics. And again, analytics are going to give you some answers that reports won't. Reports will give you the technical answer. Dennis got 60% on the exam, okay? Analytics are gonna say 80 people got 60%. And by the way, out of those question three, everybody failed. So is it their problem or is it a problem with question three? And that's how I learned. That's how I learned the importance of LMSs, by the way. My question three failed all the time. It wasn't just me. So what's the experience API? Okay, otherwise original project name was known as Tin Can and it was developed by a company called Rostici. It's an open source product, okay? Well, an open source specification, excuse me, not product. Many different products can easily be developed using the same standard. Doesn't matter what language you've developed that product in whether it be a C language or a PHP or whatever or just JavaScript, they can all talk to that same type of system using a standardized scenario. And it uses the REST API. JSON, by the way, is your JavaScript object notation. This is where things get a little technical in this. So JavaScript object notation is a standardized method of formatting your information in the database. So JSON is standardized. Okay, it works in MySQL databases which most WordPress sites use. Some WordPress sites use SQL databases which are a Microsoft proprietary database. And then for those of you who don't like to use SQL type databases because SQL wasn't ever originally actually designed as a database, it was designed as a query language. For those of you who don't like it, MongoDB is another one, very high performance database that you can store your data in. And here's just a small example of what the data looks like. So what's really important to understand here is that there's some IDs and such and such that basically point to, in my case, some of the products I make, they point to the US Department of Defense servers to get to find out what you actually did, or how, sorry, yeah, what you actually did, not what you did with or not who did it, just what was done. So Dennis climbed Mount Everest, climbed, came from, in my case, comes from a US Department of Defense server. But I don't store data there, I just go and get the definition of what I did from there. So nothing is shared with them, it's simply a read from their servers. Okay, and these things here are called recipes, they actually call them recipes. So you could actually, there is a recipe out there that says Dennis baked a cake, for example, where baked would be the data you would see here. So pulling it all together, XAPI collects data from the outside world, if you want, or internally as well, in WordPress, you can actually send that LRS server a statement that says Dennis visited post number one or Dennis visited welcome page or contact us page. You can actually track all of that information. Or if you're in an LMS world, you can send data that says Dennis completed lesson one, Dennis passed quiz one. And again, I'll just elaborate, it is cross domain compatible. So now on top of this, you've got a whole bunch of different WordPress servers that can talk to it if you want, and they can be sitting in domain A, B, C and D. And what does that also open the doors for? Your customers with their own WordPress servers and you providing that service to them, an upsell. I do it all the time. Okay, so here are basically some of the learning management systems and human resources systems and project planning systems that are pretty popular throughout the internet. These systems, not all of them talk XAPI, but they're a whole lot cheaper and a whole lot easier to integrate with XAPI. It doesn't take much at all. And it's done with WordPress development standards, not some special other code standard. It's all done within WordPress through plugins. I make a bunch of plugins for this purpose. So getting them all together, it can take a year or so before some of these systems become XAPI compatible. That wouldn't necessarily be you doing it. It might be that plugin developer. Like in my case, I developed for other LMSs. I make them XAPI compatible. There are a number of popular XAPI plugins out there already that are specific to learning management systems. And they're in the left hand column here under name. They're maturity level. What I've kind of been trying to convey there is that either they're already perfectly done and all you have to do is just basically buy the plugin, install it and configure it. Or you might need to do a little bit of customization, which would be really easy to do after. And then what systems they work with are in the right column. So in conclusion, there's four key components. You've got the learning management system, HRIS and the project management system as an example. And then you've got the LRS server, which can receive data and feed all of them. And that's pretty well it. Are there any questions? Question? You look like you got another one. No? Okay. Yes? Hi. You mentioned in the measuring performance, correlating market performance to the actual user's performance? Well, the business objectives, do you mean? Not market performance, but business objectives to the user's performance. Yeah. And basically this would be through reporting. You would identify what users are most in line with your business objectives through an analytical report or just you could do it just through a regular report. But this is where that dashboard, like the project planning dashboard would come in, is Dennis ready to take on this role in this project? So that was through like looking at your business objectives and identifying what people are going in the direction of that. And this is pure data that you can get from your learning management system, from your human resources system, pull it into a project management system to get a summary of that person's ability to fulfill that position or even know when they can fulfill the position if they can't today. So that helps you to plan your project, right? Because your human resources, you know when they're gonna be ready, you know what they're capable of doing. Does that help answer your question? It does, thank you. No problem. Are there any other questions? Are there any deer in the headlights going on? Is there anybody completely lost? I can simplify it for you. Not completely lost? I guess that concludes the presentation. Thank you for your time, everyone.