Get started with xAPI in my organization
You want to implement xAPI in your organization. How do you do that?
Step 1: Identify your problem
In the Understand section of this site, and particularly the How will xAPI benefit my organization? page, we took you through a long list of ways you could make use of xAPI in your organization. That’s a lot to achieve in your first project, so we recommend choosing just one application of xAPI to get started.
From the case studies and examples you’ve read about, which application is likely to have the biggest impact on your organization? That might be a good place to start. You should also take a look at the Run a pilot guide for some templates for simple projects you could run to get started with xAPI in your organization. Discuss your ideas with others in your organization and start to get buy in.
Step 2: Design your solution
Once you’ve choose the problem you’re going to tackle, spend some time considering your design. The Learning Design Transformed page will help you with this.
As part of your design, you’ll need to answer the following questions:
- What reports and analytics do you and your stakeholders require?
- How will individual learning experiences in your blend be connected together? What data will you need to support those connections?
- What events do you need to track? What significant actions or achievements will the learner complete as part of the solution you’re designing?
- What data do you need to collect from these events? How will that data be used? How will you collect it?
- What data do you need from outside your learning solution, for example data about job performance? How will you get that data?
You might want to follow a process such as action mapping to design your high-level solution prior to answering these questions. You or your vendor will use the answers to these questions to inform the technical architecture and statement design.
Step 3: Build and buy
Most organizations will not want to build their own LRS, authoring tool or other system since there are already good ones on the market. However, depending on your project and the capabilities in your organization, you might want to develop some elements of your solution in-house. Let’s look at what you need to do to buy and build the elements you need in order to complete your learning solution.
Buy
Every week, new products are appearing that allow you to do various things with xAPI. Chances are that there’s a product that meets some or all of your needs for your project. There’s a list of adopters you can browse to find products that look suitable. This includes links to vendor websites so you can ask them for a demo.
To help you with purchasing products, we’ve put together an RFP guide to help you outline your requirements more clearly than just a xAPI conformant tick box.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for on the adopters list, contact-us.
Build
You may prefer to build some or most of your solution in house. If that’s the case, you’ll want to pay extra attention to the Design pages on this site and dive into the resources you’ll find on the Write Code page. Developers are often impressed by the amount of support available to implement xAPI, and often find sending and retrieving xAPI data is more straightforward than they expected.
We absolutely don’t recommend building your own LRS, and that’s not just because we have our own LRS products to sell. Whilst building products that interact with an LRS is quite simple, building an LRS is hard and there are lots of products available that have already done that hard work for you.
What’s next
To continue to learn about how you can get started in your organization you can:
- See it working – a collection of links and information about how you can see xAPI in action and demo it to your stakeholders.
- Get an LRS – whatever your project, you’ll need an LRS. Figure out what LRS features you might need and how to get one that meets your needs.
- Run a pilot – a collection of simple case study projects that you can implement in your organization today.
- SCORM Evolved? – what about all your existing SCORM e-learning? Can you convert it? Do you need to? How does xAPI make a difference to that content?
Need an LRS?
We offer a range of Learning Record Stores from free simple cloud-based
LRS for testing and development, up to a fully fledged Learning Analytics Platform.