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.
Industry: Education
