Ways to Learn xAPI
I’ve been upskilling in the area of xAPI in the first half of 2023. It started with the xAPI cohort by The Learning Guild and I recently completed Jeff Batt’s xAPI course on Udemy, too. xAPI naturally builds on my programming skills.
The Udemy course provided real down and dirty hands-on practice with coding xAPI statements and receiving them in an LRS. Combined with the xAPI cohort, which was more focused on building a business case and real world examples, they complemented each other very well.
One big takeaway is that I don’t need to reinvent the wheel to do this work. There are so many pre-written profiles and statements out there on Github or xAPI Lab that I need to just find existing information.
Also, this experience reinforced my belief in hands-on practice. It wasn’t until I was doing the work, tweaking code in Visual Code Scribe and Storyline, trying out different settings in SCORM Cloud, that things really clicked. Watching all the tutorials in the world isn’t the same as just giving it a go.
My favorite thing I’ve learned in this process is that we should use xAPI to “collect the experiences that matter,” according to Jeff Batt. We can collect xAPI data from any source; Twine, YouTube, Storyline, PDFs, etc. But we should think long and hard about exactly what information would be most valuable.
You can help test my new xAPI skills by visiting this website and playing the video. That data will be sent to my SCORM Cloud LRS, woot woot! Seems simple but there is a lot of custom programming behind that functionality.
Next up? I’m always learning so of course I’m thinking about what’s next. Building PowerBI Dashboards with data analytics capability and brushing up on my Photoshop skills are next on my list.
