Caliper Analytics is the 1EdTech standard for describing learning events — a student viewing a resource, starting an assessment, submitting work, completing a module. It defines a metric profile vocabulary and a sensor API that emits events to a downstream analytics store.
Caliper Analytics
Caliper is a standardised event surface for education, which makes its adoption profile one of the more frustrating findings in this research. The specification exists, the vocabulary is settled, and the domain — terms, deadlines, cohorts, completions — is nothing but scheduled state change.
- Metric profiles - Typed event vocabularies per activity: assessment, media, reading, forum, tool use.
- A sensor API - A defined way for a platform to emit events rather than each vendor inventing a webhook shape.
- Actor, action, object - An event model close enough to xAPI to invite comparison, and different enough to fragment adoption.
- Downstream analytics - Designed to feed a learning record store rather than to be queried directly.
In The State of Education & EdTech APIs, event surface description sits at 10.8% of the market’s leaders — below the whole-catalog rate, in the sector that has a purpose-built event standard. Caliper is the strongest evidence in that report for a pattern the series keeps finding: a market can have exactly the specification it needs and still not publish against it, because nothing in its commercial model rewards doing so.
Industry: Education
Also in the data model catalog
This standard shows up on both sides of the house — as a standard applied in API operations here, and as a data model defining what information exists. Same standard, two lenses.
See it as a data model →