RESOURCE: Full Guide to xAPI and Storyline

Hi, Devlin,

Great work. I don't use xAPI at this time, but I bookmarked your guide for future reference. I'm sure others will find it useful.

KUDOS!

That's awesome, Judy! Thanks for checking it out :) 

Wow this is awesome! Before i start to get too excited and/or confused, would this work for when i want to export assessment information into an excel document or google sheet? 

I've been trying to find a solution to gather information on what answers my students are giving in assessments to help understand what topics they struggle in. Will your solution work for this? 

Thanks

Lesley 

Hi Lesley! It absolutely would...I'm actually working on a project now where I automatically send statements from Watershed LRS to a Google Sheet. 

You may want to take a look at Zapier's pricing (an automation tool needed to get the data from the Learning Record Store, or LRS, to a Google Sheet) to see if it fits with your needs / budget.

EDIT: To follow up on this, if you just want to do a basic manual export from LRS to spreadsheet, then you can do that for free from any LRS!

Hi Devlin! Thanks so much for posting these tutorials! I've followed the basic ones backward and forward but am running into a snag because I'm trying to apply what you've written to a different use case. 

1. I would like to use the TinCan compatible LMS "LearnUpon", not a standalone LRS like you've shown. My understanding is that the LMS will supply the "actor" information. I'm not sure if I still need to call GetPlayer() somewhere or not.

2. I would like to use Storyline's default ability to create statements for graded questions and then integrate them with my own statements. I'm hoping to load the whole zip package into the LMS and have it produce one report that contains both default and custom activity statements. From my testing, when I publish a storyline course using TinCan, Storyline produces a file called tincan.xml. The rules of this output are published here.  I believe (but am not certain) that the purpose of this file is the same as the script called xapi-statement.js in your tutorials. The LearnUpon LMS looks for the tincan.xml file in the root folder and won't publish without it. In the tutorial files you've published as Web, not as TinCan. Why is that?

Do you know how I might adapt all the good information in your tutorials to somehow have the javascript triggers execute an activity statement that ends up in the tincan.xml file? Or, is there another approach I could use with an LMS?

Hi Fiona! What you're trying to do is definitely possible, but I have not worked with LearnUpon before. Here is the general approach to accomplishing your goal:

1. Create the xapi-statement.js file just as described in the tutorials, then add the "Execute JavaScript" triggers in your course to generate the custom statements.
2. Once you've published the xAPI package, connect the story.html file to the xapi-statement.js and xapiwrapper.min.js files, just as described in the tutorials.
3. The actor information will likely be provided by the LMS via a query string when you launch the course from the LMS. This means that you will need to pull the the actor object from the query string using JavaScript to use it in your custom xAPI statements. (So you will need to modify the xapi-statement.js file accordingly). 
4. Make sure that the credentials for the conf object are pointing at the LRS that's built into your LMS. If these credentials are not exposed, then I'm not sure how you would send custom statements to their LRS.

You won't need to get user name or email variables from the Storyline course since they'll be provided via a query string by the LMS, but if you want to use any variables from Storyline in your xAPI statements, then you will need to define the player variable using GetPlayer(). This will make more sense once you get to the intermediate tutorials.

After you take a look at query strings and how to access objects from them, give me a shout if you still need a hand. Learning more about JavaScript and xAPI will only help when it comes to accomplishing something like this.

Finally, to answer your question about why I don't publish as an xAPI package -- I prefer to have full control over the xAPI statements that are generated from the course. You cannot modify the verbs used by the default Storyline xAPI functionality (for example, every time a user views a slide, they "experienced" it). This has implications when it comes to querying the data and viewing data streams from multiple tools.

If you aren't too concerned about querying and making the data interoperable with other tools, then it's perfectly fine to do what you're trying to do (and I've done it before myself, too). Perhaps this is a good tutorial to add in the future.

Best of luck!

Hey again, Fiona. You won't need to deal with the tincan.xml file. The LRS is what receives the statements, and the LMS is what hosts the content. In your case, you will need to send the statements to your LMS's built-in LRS.

You can ensure that those statements get to the LRS by setting the conf object with the endpoint, API key, and API secret, as defined in the tutorials. The story.html file knows that those extra scripts are there because you link them after publishing the course (described in part 3 of the tutorial).

Hope that helps!

Thanks so much, that helps a lot. I'll let you know how it goes!  

Hiya, I'm dipping my toes into xAPI as we're looking at different LMS/LXP.

Looking at your guide has me a little bit worried as it seems so much additional work. With xAPI do you have to build a JSON object for every interaction?

As a minimum we don't want to lose any reporting function we currently have with SCORM 2004, (report on what questions people have answered and if they've got it right or not.) I know xAPI can record so much more, but do you have to manually build that in the JSON file even when using storyline? 

 Any help would be great 

Hi Devlin,

Thanks for putting all this together, it’s amazing and so helpful when working with custom statements.

Would I be right in guessing if we sent a variable text entry in say Module 1 as a statement to the LRS,  we would be able to pull that statement into Module 2 so the user could see their entry to continue the user journey?

If so, I don’t suppose you have any tutorials on that?

Thanks again for all your work you’ve put into the tutorials above.