Forum Discussion

IanDavies-43652's avatar
IanDavies-43652
Community Member
3 years ago

Course name not available in LRS using xAPI

I have a Rise course embedded in my LMS (Learnupon) using xAPI, and my LMS is configured to forward all xAPI statements to an LRS.

However, in  the LRS, I only see the Identifier for my course, not the course name (see excerpt below).

...

"object": {
"id": "http://BTOU9-J_LmHrlsWMoZcBx6LD4lA9ra2W_rise",
"objectType": "Activity",
"definition": {
"type": "http://adlnet.gov/expapi/activities/course"
}
}, ...


I see that the course name is present in the tincan.xml file, but according to my LMS provider, they don't receive the course name in the xAPI statements and it is not their responsibility to associate the two things together when forwarding to an LRS.  So my question is, does Rise really not send the name of the course in the object, and is there a way to configure this?  I guess I could change the ID when I publish the course but then I'd need to be very careful about making each course name unique and this doesn't work so well with different versions of courses with the same title.  I expected to have an autogenerated ID but also find a readable "name" element within the definition that contains the course name.  It's quite pointless having an LRS if I cannot associate it easily with a particular course.  Has anyone else experienced this and are there good ways to overcome this, please?

Thanks,

Ian.

6 Replies

  • Hi Ian. I can see that you have a support case with us. It looks like our support engineer confirmed that the course title isn't sent in the xAPI statements. You would need to change the pre-generated identifier during export and don't use any special characters. 

    • ShannonOKeefe-b's avatar
      ShannonOKeefe-b
      Community Member

      Can you explain that solution more please? Changing the pre-generated identifier? I'm experimenting with the UDN in Storyline for this same reason. How can I marry the data to the course title?

  • Hi, Shannon!

    I'm happy to jump in to try and help you out here. Since the course title isn't sent in the xAPI statements, you can change the pre-generated identifier during the export. Note that if you alter the pre-generated identifier, don't use special characters. For versioning, just add a numeric suffix for the title you're going to be typing on the identifier.

    Here's a thread on changing the identifier that may be helpful:

    If you have additional questions please don't hesitate to reach out here or privately in a support case!

  • Thank you.  I hope the information sent can become more comprehensive in the future as there's no reason not to pass this information.

  • Hi!

    Was this issue solved for the course name? 

    While I can see here the workaround for the problem with the course name, I experience the same issue with the module (lesson) names - only IDs are available in the LRS data and there is no way to easily associate those non-interpretable IDs to particular modules. These names, for both course and modules are available in the tincan.xml during the export from Articulate, so I wonder, why aren't they available in LRS?

    While the tincan.xml theoretically can be extracted from the exported zip file, parsed, and used as a dictionary to map IDs and names, this will become quite cumbersome with different course versions and with zip files (= Articulate's course object) reused in multiple courses on LMS.

    It would be much easier to analyze the data on LRS if object.name was populated not only for knowledge check question objects (cmi.interaction) but also for course and module objects.

    I would appreciate your help with this issue.

    Best regards,

    Lada

    • StevenBenassi's avatar
      StevenBenassi
      Staff

      Hi KNIMEAuthorEdu!

      Thanks for checking in on this!

      We're still tracking a feature request to extend xAPI reporting when publishing from Rise 360 to LMS. If released, this feature enhancement will include course identifier names, as well as descriptions of activity objects.

      I've included your voice in the request! We'll be sure to notify you as soon as we have updates to share.