Last year, I met Andrew Bloye from ClearXP at a conference and we started and landed on the same frustration: xAPI is one of the most powerful standards in the learning technology world, and almost nobody in Australia was using it.
That conversation became the xAPI Collective Australia. And it recently led to a great chat on the Tangents with TorranceLearning podcast, where I sat down with Megan Torrance and Meg Fairchild to talk about where xAPI came from, where it’s going, and what it looks like when you stop thinking about learning data as something that only lives inside an LMS.
The problem with 3am webinars
When Andrew and I first started talking about xAPI, most of the best content, the webinars, the deep dives, the case studies, was coming out of the US and UK. Genuinely excellent material. Just badly timed for us.
A webinar that runs at a sensible hour in Michigan runs at 3am in Brisbane. You can sign up. You can even mean to watch the recording later. But life gets in the way, and the momentum that live conversation creates just doesn’t translate the same way to a video you watch three weeks later, alone, at your desk.
So we asked the obvious question: why not bring the conversation here?
Building something for our timezone
The xAPI Collective Australia started as a simple idea. Same calibre of conversation, same passionate community, just scheduled for a time when someone can join with a coffee in hand instead of setting an alarm for the middle of the night.
We’ve had some brilliant guests come through, including people from Veracity, Shelley, and Megan herself, all sharing what they’re actually doing with xAPI in the real world. It’s not a lecture series. It’s practitioners talking to practitioners about what’s working, what’s not, and what they’re still figuring out.
And slowly, the word is getting out. xAPI doesn’t have to be scary or overly technical. It’s a standard that, once you understand what it actually enables, changes how you think about capturing evidence of learning and skill.
From xAPI theory to real-world evidence
On the podcast, the conversation naturally moved from the Collective into Remote Reviewer, the platform I’ve built for capturing and reviewing real-world skills demonstrations using xAPI and AI.
The core idea ties directly back to why the Collective exists in the first place. A completion tick in an LMS tells you someone finished a course. It doesn’t tell you they can actually do the thing. xAPI lets you capture much richer evidence, wherever that evidence happens to occur, whether that’s a workshop floor, a remote mine site, or someone’s garage sanding a piece of timber.
That’s the shift I’m most passionate about: moving learning and assessment data beyond the LMS silo, and using xAPI to make it interoperable, portable, and genuinely useful.
Have a listen
If you’re curious about the origin story of the Collective, how xAPI plays out in real-world assessment scenarios, or where decentralised learning and mentorship might be headed next, the full episode is worth your time.
Listen here: https://www.torrancelearning.com/tangents-podcast/digital-learning-innovation-with-julian-davis/
And if you’ve heard of xAPI but haven’t quite taken the plunge, or you’re already using it and want to swap notes with people who get it, that’s exactly what the xAPI Collective Australia is for. Come join us.
Compiled with the aid of AI