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xAPI lets you gather specific information about how learners interact with your courses, and store it in your own LRS (Learning Record Store).

It specifies how learning content, activities, and systems share data and track user interactions, behaviours, state, and context. All this data can then be sent to your own independent database (which xAPI calls the Learning Record Store or LRS). xAPI is the successor to the now obsolete SCORM standard, providing a new approach to address the needs of greater flexibility, security, and interoperability in modern platforms.

Event Triggers

The mechanism by which xAPI sends interaction events (xAPI statements) is via HTTP, acting as a webhook. This allows user actions on OpenLearning to trigger actions in other systems such as CRMs and Analytics tools or any other system which can receive an HTTP Request with a JSON body.

Any course can be configured to send xAPI statements using a resthook by providing the required endpoint and credentials to the OpenLearning Courses API, or via a Zapier integration (for use cases where a fully-fledged LRS is not required). e.g. triggering an event when a user has completed a course.

 

The general flow is illustrated as follows:

xAPI Statements

Configuring your OpenLearning course with an LRS (or another system which receives xAPI statements) means that interactions made by learners in your courses can be sent to your other systems, to trigger integrations or for storage alongside other learning data. The OpenLearning platform automatically tracks and sends user events as xAPI statements, such as:

• Visiting a page

• Commenting/replying on a page

• Commenting/replying on a post

• Sharing a post from a widget

• Completing a widget, page, or course

• Receiving a certificate

A full list is available here.

In addition to these statements, you can also include your own HTML5 content (upload your own xAPI package) within a course. This content can be configured to track its own interactions and send additional statements to your LRS and OpenLearning (e.g. to track completion). 

OpenLearning's "HTML5/xAPI" widget can be used to include xAPI-enabled content inside an OpenLearning course.  In OpenLearning's authoring tools, it has the following icon:

OpenLearning will send (to your LRS) both the xAPI statements generated for all interactions within an OpenLearning course, as well as any interactions within these included xAPI-supporting tools. (e.g. xAPI-enabled packages built and uploaded by the course creator using the OpenLearning xAPI widget).

A diagram of how xAPI integrations are structured in a typical education technology ecosystem.

 

OpenLearning cannot create an LRS for you as of yet. If you would like to create one, you can do so using one of the following products: 

• WatershedLRS (SaaS product, with a free tier)
• Learning Locker (Open source installation, or cloud-hosted SaaS product)
• Yet Analytics (Open source installation)
• ScormCloud 
• or your own xAPI LRS provider

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Connecting LRS to your Openlearning course

You can either connect the LRS (or rest hook) to your course using the OpenLearning API /courses/{course_id}/xapi-integrations/ endpoint or set it up on the institution level as below.

Note that the steps below can only be done by a portal administrator. For course admins, please use the API instead. 

Step 1

Go to your portal Institution Settings and click Integration.

Step 2

 

Scroll down to LRS Setup and click Add LRS.

Step 3

Enter your LRS details including the endpoint URL, key and secret.

Step 4

Select the xAPI statements that you want to capture and send across to your LRS, click Save.

Step 5

Click Edit and select the courses you would like to link to the LRS and click Done to save the changes.