Profile Meeting 4/22
IEEE xAPI Profile TAG Meeting Minutes
4/22/20, 3pm Eastern
Meeting Topic: What xAPI Profiles are “out there”, and how might one catalog, organize and/or distinguish them?
Team
Host: Aaron Silvers
Community Manager/Secretary: Eva Rendle
Producer: Megan Bowe
In Attendance
Aaron Silvers
Fridolin Wild
Eleni Mangina
Tom creighton
Jonathan Poltrack
Helena Smith
Florian Tolk
Avron Barr
Marcus Birtwhistle
Megan Bowe
Eva Rendle
Devlin Peck
Andy Johnson
Kristen Safdie
Jeffrey Beaubien
Jason Pessemier
Kevin Owens
Rob Chadwick
Kristi Eager
Florian: How is profile defined? JSON-LD or generally describing how a statement should be formed
Aaron: The bigger picture is where we’re focusing.
Fridolin: We are in the process of working out a new xAPI profile for AR in the EU project 'ARETE', what is the current recommended practice of expressing our profile? I see that on github they are all quite different...?
Aaron: The JSON-LD covers specific parts which are easy to automate. The more nuanced implementation requires a combination of technology and design guidance.
One of the goals is writing instructions that folks can follow and following them ourselves -
Chat comment from Helena Smith: need standards of instruction across the board
Question to be answered:
Who owns the profile and for whom is it written?
Even just ADL examples have many different authors
Examining CMI5 Profile - none of the profiles have links to documentation…
Looking over SCORM profile documentation - has use cases for scorm profile, examples of IRIs and IRIs that do not work, provides format for an actor, and how an actor might be part of a group, table for verb information
If not a CMI5 interaction, might want to use a different word than “responded”
Chat comment from Kristen Safdie: “I think it's just the wording of "some interaction" that is vague. My assumption is that it's a response to a text entry stored there. The actor responded to the object with the context (whatever their response is)”
Examining the Video Profile - Scorm profile is pretty complex, looking for an easier example
Video has a small set of verbs. Extensions might help define how much time from, time to, progress, time elapsed into video. There are also properties in the video profile - like did subtitles get used
More showcasing of how hard the documentation is to find…
Kaltura’s documentation has “Events” for their xAPI. More implementation focused and light troubleshooting.
Profiles have been developed using moodle by an author named Sebastian
Open Learning’s profile - simplified statement guidelines, mostly vocab. Specific json samples included. Not super explicit about what the data will look like, no full statement examples
Profiles - who, what, where, when, why how?
What are characteristics of profiles you have seen which should be promoted in the future?
Safdie: Use of good/bad examples. When to use a verb and when to not use a verb, etc.
Fridolin: Organize profile - look into gitbook approach for humans, branch off profile into the json-ld file to define profile data requirements (no quite his words, but what he was talking towards)
Aaron: Define who the documentation is being written for. Helps with organization and communication strategy
How do you know if your profile is good? How can that be evaluated?
AR profile has very specific industrial training area with 3 pilots PBIS (monitoring school children’s attitude)
Language development for school children
This use case provides good questions
Existing profile or concepts that describe AR experiences?
Video is relevant
Should be several others (verbs from activity streams)
Have you identified verbs, etc that activity is accounted for
What ideas need to go where (organize information), what to be shared, what is unique, who audience is
Question about JSON and JSON LD and RDF documents - JSON LD is more straightforward and automatically create RDF docs
Chat comment from Eleni Mangina: “Re-usability is also a target for our project - so if a profile worked great for our project we want to share the documentation for re-usability and adaption from other projects
Chat comment from Kristen Safdie: “A way to identify where verbs are already used in profiles would be very helpful. My use case is thinking about a cross between eBooks and existing SCORM profiles and being able to quickly pull up what verbs are re-used between each (and may overlap) would help make sure that a new profile isn't stepping on too many existing verbs.”
Next Meeting: May 6th, 3pm Eastern
Meeting Topic:
What Challenges Can Be Addressed with xAPI Profiles?
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References & Source Material used for 4/22/20 Meeting
Today’s slides: https://1drv.ms/p/s!Av4nfZFOBTgagT1zCv4g3PBcv5Na
ADL has a repository on GitHub with a curated set of xAPI Profiles. It’s the one location most often promoted to look for xAPI Profiles: https://github.com/adlnet/xapi-authored-profiles
Medbiquitous has a repository on GitHub with both a Virtual Patient and a Scenario xAPI Profile. https://github.com/medbiq/medbiq/tree/master/xapi
JISC has an xAPI Profile for the UK’s national learning analytics initiative: https://github.com/jiscdev/xapi
OpenLearning shares the actions taken by statements, letting developers for the platform know what is triggered by anticipated xAPI statements:https://help.openlearning.com/t/63ax49/xapi-list-of-statements-verbs-and-objects
Sébastien Fraysse has authored a number of learning technology efforts focused on french-speaking communities of practice. He’s organized templates and concepts in-kind: http://doc.xapi.fr/profiles/xapi/readme
http://doc.xapi.fr/profiles/moodle (used by Trax Moodle Plugin to track LMS events and H5P events as of the latest version of Moodle)
For its product, Percipio, Skillsoft shares the actions taken by statements, letting developers for the platform know what is anticipated by the system: https://documentation.skillsoft.com/en_us/pes/Integration/Understanding-Percipio/xAPI/pes_supported_statements_vocabulary.htm
Kaltura has a fairly comprehensive document that not only shares the actions taken by statements, letting developers know what is anticipated by the system… it also has details that further support the intentions and best practices that can’t be automated. https://knowledge.kaltura.com/help/xapi-analytics-guide#learning-record-stores-supported
Note: the (lack of) technical difference between “Tin Can” and xAPI (at least to 1.0)
The PEBL project led by Eduworks has strong documentation for its xAPI support:,
xAPI Educational resources:
xAPI projects: