xAPI is the successor to SCORM’s data model, describing learning experiences as actor-verb-object statements sent to a Learning Record Store. Unlike SCORM it is not confined to a browser session inside an LMS, so it can record learning that happens anywhere — simulations, field work, mobile, on the job.
xAPI
xAPI replaced a completion flag with a sentence. This person did this thing to that object, in this context, with this result. That model is unusually well suited to an agentic world, where the record of what a learner — or an agent acting for them — actually did matters more than whether a course was marked complete.
- Statements - Actor, verb, object, plus context and result — a general-purpose learning event.
- Learning Record Store - A defined API for storing and querying statements, independent of any LMS.
- Beyond the browser - Records experiences no LMS-hosted runtime could observe.
- Profiles - Community vocabularies constrain the general model to a domain.
xAPI and Caliper solve overlapping problems from different communities, which has split adoption between them and left The State of Education & EdTech APIs measuring a described event surface at 10.8% of leaders. The specification an agent would most want to read in this market already exists twice, and is published by almost nobody.
Referenced in API Evangelist papers
This standard shows up in my published research. These reports read the machine-readable evidence provider by provider — and put this standard in the context of a real sector.
The State of Education & EdTech APIs
Actor-verb-object learning records, in a market describing an event surface at 10.8% — the specification an agent would most want already exists twice over.
