Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Tommy Borgelin -
Aantal antwoorden: 10

Hi,

As the SCORM-format has become outdated on many aspects, xAPI (TinCan) is getting more and more headroom in the e-learning space.

I'm to trying to get a grasp on what the possibilities are in Moodle with regards to xAPI. I know Moodle supports the possibility of handling statements for any plugins that require/needs it:

The final objective of Moodle xAPI library is NOT to implement a full LRS inside Moodle but to provide an easy way to handle xAPI statements within any plugin that needs it.
For now Moodle will focus on supporting the main xAPI request which is called “statement”. A statement must be seen as a tracking message that can be used by any plugin to store user activity directly to the Moodle without programming any additional web service.
As I'm trying to find my bearings on this subject, it seems the only plugin that makes it possible to actually pull xAPI data from courses and forward it to a LRS is xAPI Launch Link which was last updated 4 years ago?
Why isn't this functionality already implemented in Moodle?
Was H5P meant to alleviate xAPI-functionality in Moodle?

I would be very grateful if someone can clarify these things for me and/ or point me in the right direction.

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Re: Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Howard Miller -
Foto van Core developers Foto van Documentation writers Foto van Particularly helpful Moodlers Foto van Peer reviewers Foto van Plugin developers

"xAPI (TinCan) is getting more and more headroom in the e-learning space"

Really? I can't remember the last time anybody mentioned xAPI to me. It must be years. I thought it was (effectively) dead and gone.

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Re: Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Dan Marsden -
Foto van Core developers Foto van Particularly helpful Moodlers Foto van Peer reviewers Foto van Plugin developers Foto van Plugins guardians Foto van Testers Foto van Translators
yeah - I haven't seen it get "more headroom" except with commerical authoring tool publishers trying to compete with other authoring tools like H5P - and even then it's usually just a checkbox in their export process and to the end-user completing the learning package they don't usually notice or care if it's backend is reporting as scorm or xapi.

It does still come up in RFP's every now and then, but usually as a checkbox rather than a real requirement or a real use-case for xAPI.

I am a fan of some of the xAPI spec and we do offer the use of Learning Locker integrated with Moodle to our clients at Catalyst, but often what our clients find is they don't actually want an LRS, what they really want is improved reporting tools on their LMS. (and there are several other better options to do this with Moodle.)
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Re: Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Tommy Borgelin -
Thank you guys for the replies so far. This is very interesting, as I also notice LRS-providers write articles on xAPI. Here is an example amongst many:
https://www.elucidat.com/blog/scorm-vs-tin-can-xapi/

More questions arise at this point:
- If you have more than 1 LMS, wouldn't a LRS with xAPI-support be the better choice for pulling out statistics/user-data from all the LMS-sources?
- Do you have examples of better options with regards to tracking user-data directly from Moodle instead of using a LRS with xAPI (I guess you're talking about plugins here?)
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Re: Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Dan Marsden -
Foto van Core developers Foto van Particularly helpful Moodlers Foto van Peer reviewers Foto van Plugin developers Foto van Plugins guardians Foto van Testers Foto van Translators
yes - if you have multiple sources of learning records - multiple distinct LMS systems, NOT just content packages launched within an LMS that can all report into an LRS this is one of the more interesting use-cases for an LRS. (and Moodle can do this now using the xapi logstore plugin.)

But... before decided on a reporting technology you need to work out your audience for this aggregated data and understand what sort of reports they are wanting to extract.

One of the challenges with an LRS is that while it's really nice to have data all structured in a similar way from multiple sources, it often misses a lot of the context required for many high-level reports. Typically it's only "logs or user access/(learning records)" that are reported to the external LRS - so if you want to know "what percentage of the activities that are available to this user in this course have been completed" - the only part of that you can usually get from the LRS is "what activities are completed" - you can't see what activities are currently available to this user. The more reports you write, the more extra detail you find that you need which is not stored as learning records, but is stored in some other way in the LMS - and then someone comes along and says - we want to include information from the library system in this report .... but our library system doesn't support xAPI - so all of a sudden your choice of technology prevents you from generating reports on all the systems you are responsible for.

Saying that - an LRS does work really well for specific use-cases, however in most cases I come across what people are really looking for is much more integrated reporting system allowing a data-warehouse team to ingest data from multiple sources with the full context available within each system. We see Power BI used a lot in this manner but it usually requires some good internal capability to write the range of reports required - but there are also other commercial tools like Intelliboard (Official Moodle certified integration partner) which provide good out of the box reporting on top of Moodle LMS systems.

If you're not a Microsoft shop or not interested in Power BI, there are a lot of other tools out there that do similar things (ingest multiple data-sources) like Apache superset (originally written by Airbnb), and Metabase (we're using metabase internally for a bunch of our fleet management reporting at Catalyst).

All these solutions all require a decent chunk of effort to implement whether it be LRS, Power Bi, or other custom reporting tool (the easiest to roll that I mentioned above is probably Intelliboard) - the main key is to understand your end-goal before choosing a technology. Write some user stories and list some of the reports you would like to be able to generate out of an aggregated reporting tool, including a list of all the places where the data you want to report on is stored (often many of those locations will not be Xapi compatible either.)

I am yet to find a client that actively decides to implement an LRS after performing a proper analysis on the sorts of reports they want to generate, and an understanding on where all the data is stored that will be required to generate these reports.
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Re: Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Tommy Borgelin -
Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to write all this information, it's very helpful.
To get the detailed information from reports directly from the LMS you mention, how can this be achieved exactly?
Let's say I create a course in Articulates Storyline 360 and upload it to Moodle as a SCORM-package, won't that inhibit reporting-tools / plug-ins from catching all the data you would want when users starts to go through it?
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Re: Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Dan Marsden -
Foto van Core developers Foto van Particularly helpful Moodlers Foto van Peer reviewers Foto van Plugin developers Foto van Plugins guardians Foto van Testers Foto van Translators
There really is not a lot of practical difference between an Articulate package that reports as SCORM vs reporting as xAPI - they both send back almost the same sorts of data to the LMS (or the LRS) just in a different format. At the moment - Moodle doesn't provide any reporting for XAPI data out of the box though - so if your aim is to write content packages in a commercial external tool like articulate and embed them in Moodle - just hit the scorm checkbox for now.

but... you really should start looking outside Articulate for content development - these days you can do a lot better using other tools for content creation like developing the content natively in your LMS, or H5P... but... that's a different discussion knipoog
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Re: Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Tommy Borgelin -
Well, it could seem that xAPI have the ability to capture a lot more data that can be collected compared to SCORM though:
(The following table is from the link I posted earlier.)

scorm vs xapi

Isn't this one of the reasons why LRS-providers advertise the format (if true)?
And if I implement Intelliboard as an example, how can this software capture complex reporting like the examples you provided if the content-package is reporting in SCORM-format?

On the content-creation side of things, I heard it's hard to create the complexity Storyline offers in let's say H5P. Triggers and variables, for example. Though I haven't had the time to look into the H5P-format much myself yet, it's on the todo-list. I'd love to see some examples though.

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Re: Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Howard Miller -
Foto van Core developers Foto van Documentation writers Foto van Particularly helpful Moodlers Foto van Peer reviewers Foto van Plugin developers
There's some rather vague "marketing" terms in there.....
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Re: Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Marcus Green -
Foto van Core developers Foto van Particularly helpful Moodlers Foto van Plugin developers Foto van Testers
Informal learning
Definition:
While not wearing a tie.
While wearing "sweat pants"
While lying on a couch
< /humour >

Having said that I don't doubt that xAPI/TinCan offers benefits over SCORM.
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Re: Moodle 4.0 and xAPI

door Dan Marsden -
Foto van Core developers Foto van Particularly helpful Moodlers Foto van Peer reviewers Foto van Plugin developers Foto van Plugins guardians Foto van Testers Foto van Translators
yeah - those checklist comparison charts are often a bit vague..

Yes - xAPI is more flexible in terms of what you can report on because the SCORM standard is quite restrictive... but... the context is important here - again, what are you actually wanting to report on, who is the audience for these reports, and what is the use-case for generating them?

If you're talking about a stand-alone content package, produced by a SCORM authoring tool that happens to also export in xAPI - obviously at the top of that list is "completion" and "grade/score", then often time to complete and responses to questions... and all of that (and some more) is available within the existing SCORM standard - you gain very little "practical" improvement in data that you will actually use by just making a switch in the authoring tool from SCORM to xAPI - you need to have a better reason for switching to using xAPI and a real use-case for the extra information that you might be able to store. (then a bunch of investment in time to write useful reports on that data.)

IMO - xAPI doesn't provide much value if you're just ticking the xAPI box insetad of the SCORM box when exporting a content package from a commercial tool if your aim is to just launch it from your single LMS and continue to report on it within your single LMS
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