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Adventures in xAPI Implementation: Introduction

If you're new to Instructional Design, or new to xAPI, well...you're a lot like me.

A few months ago, I was working as a Project Manager. I had been working primarily as a Project Manager the better part of 7 years. Before that I was a restaurant manager. Instructional Design was nowhere near my radar.

I've always loved solving problems. I enjoy understanding how and why things work the way they do, so as a child in the 90's who had access to a computer, once I discovered the internet I wanted to know how it, too, worked. Coding was a natural fit for me, and before I knew it I was building websites, tweaking blog and (what would eventually become known as) social media profiles, and even setting up some online businesses. I loved it, and eventually picked up some work where I was able to learn about SQL and PHP...but with the pressure to go to college, get a job, etc meant that my love for coding kind of fell to the wayside. Fortunately, I've had reasons to dip back in here and there, so some of my skills have stayed relatively up to date, but there are other areas where I am completely blind.

Learning specifications are definitely one of those areas.

A few months ago, I had never heard the term SCORM or xAPI...I don't even know if I had heard of Articulate, and if I had, I didn't know what it was or how to use it.

Today, I am turning over my first eLearning course - a course designed in Storyline that utilizes xAPI for more in depth tracking of learner data, which then ends up in an LRS that I have also set up.

Some of the things I've included in this course are:

  • a personality assessment that will log 40 traits per person
  • course content that personalizes to the results of said assessment
  • an interactive scenario
  • a printable plan formed from the learner's answers to specific questions
  • light/night modes

It's been an adventure, and I'm excited to have a place to share the experience I had, and the lessons that come from it as it goes out to learners. My next post will dig more into the actual implementation of xAPI in a Storyline course, how to send custom xAPI statements using Storyline triggers, and a preview of what that data looks like as it comes back to us.

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