xAPI has been a buzzword among eLearning professionals for a while, and rightly so. It’s very exciting to know that you can see exactly who looked at what page in your eLearning and for how long they looked at it. Seeing the results come in that say 200 people experienced this module and 150 people experienced that module rocks. The data xAPI provides can be very gratifying for an instructional designer, and allows us to help our learner even more.

Megan Torrance, xAPI champion and head of TorranceLearning, said in a recent podcast that from an instructional design perspective, xAPI actually brings us back to the roots of what we should be doing, or what our business acumen tells us we should be doing—getting away from information dumps and tying learning back to performance. With xAPI we can get better data to help us look at the results and the outward impact of what we’re doing, not just what learning modules were looked at.

xAPI—a catalyst

I think it’s interesting that when you hear someone talk about xAPI, they often use the word “catalyst” in that conversation. In the same webcast, Torrance describes instructional designers as having the opportunity to be “catalysts for our organizations.” With xAPI, we can help our clients or stakeholders think “how will we measure if this is successful?” instead of “how many people took this course?” Mike Hruska, President and CEO of Problem Solutions, wrote a great guest post for us talking about human capital analytics and how xAPI is rapidly changing and catalyzing technology and product development in learning, education, and training. When xAPI was first emerging, Andrew Downes of Watershed LRS tweeted that he saw xAPI as “an enabler, catalyst, and ‘kick in the pants.’”

At the eLearning Brothers, nothing excites us more than new ways to enable people to become eLearning rockstars and we love how xAPI gives instructional designers more options and new ways of thinking about benefiting learners. Because of that, we even include published for xAPI files in all of our Customizable Courseware!

To learn more about the benefits of xAPI, check out these webinars:

Increase the Value of Your eLearning with HTML5 and xAPI

Future of eLearning – The Death of the LMS and eLearning s Next Generation of Tools

Let us show you how xAPI can transform your learning. Talk to our Custom Solutions team today.