As part of the development and introduction of xAPI into a large organisation, it can always be a challenge to provide the benefits. I’d like to share with you how I used xAPI with Articulate Storyline 360, published as SCORM and being delivered via a Learning Management System (LMS). The Learning Record Store (LRS) is Learning Locker.
To summarise, a department needed to be able to capture the answers selected in assessments being delivered online. The assessments had been updated from Lectora to Storyline. Lectora had the ability to send the results of an assessment via email, which was ideal. However with the organisation moving to Articulate, this was not part of Storyline.
I was involved in a pilot program to introduce xAPI (and other learning technologies) and could see how xAPI could be used to capture this data.
I used the Javascript library that is explained in the article My LMS Only Supports SCORM, How do I use xAPI. This was the easy part. I added a Trigger for each time a question was answered. This also populated the results component of the xAPI statement.
With the data now captured, I needed a way to display the data in a meaningful way. Using the builtin reports from Learning Locker were not quite what we wanted.
With some research and lots of playing, I eventually used some Javascript to pull data from the LRS and then display the results. Adding some CSS to show what the learner got right and wrong, along with filtering of the results ended up with a product that is easy to use. The product sits in the internal SharePoint site, which supports the Single Sign On authentication model. Instructors and tutors can review the results (in almost real time by refreshing) and print the results if needed.
The first part of page was to access the Activities. This was by far the most tricky part as i couldn’t locate how xAPI Wrapper can just pull up each course uniquely. As I had control over what was going into the SCROM packages as far as xAPI Statements, I settled for using the Launched verb. This is only used once in the course. Once I had this, I could use the activityID to pull the students. From there, it was a simple process to pull all the data for that student and render the output.
Whilst I’m unable to share the code, below is a short video of the final product. It’s proven to be a simple yet powerful tool and a great selling point to get xAPI setup with in a large organisation.
Dear Julian
I’m working in my research project that involve Extracting data from LMS by using X-api method and I’m not familiar with X-api.
Could you please assist me to learn how to extract data Using x-api.
That depends entirely on what you want to extract and for what purpose? What’s the purpose of extracting the data? BI or something else
Also, xAPI is in an LRS, not an LMS (usually)
Well, I need to capture student data from LRS of my University
mostly data related to student behavior such as : student grade, attendance, course taken, class participation etc… for purpose to predict their class performance in future according to their respective behavior feature by using Python or Microsoft Azure Machine Learning for implementation.
Thank you.
Hi Alex – Do you have an LRS yet?
Hi Ms. Julian
Actually my University is using an LMS We don’t have yet an LRS build by the university.
Hi Ms.Julian
My university doesn’t have an LRS we are still using LMS
You can use any LRS, but as you are running a bespoke LMS, you may find some challenges
Which type of LRS you can advise me to use or did you have anyone to propose to me?
Depends what you’re after. If you want a SaaS, I would suggest looking at VeraCity or if you want to host yourself, Learning Locker has an open source solution and an AWS image.
Most LRS’s have a free solution for you to try and they must comply with the spec. It comes down to reporting and ease of use.
Thank You Mr.Julian for your supporting response
I’ll look at those advising framework and get back to you soon.