The Value of an Advanced xAPI Enablement of Moodle: Considering in the Context of K12

Background

Over the course of 2024, the Yet Analytics team worked on a major open source upgrade to the xAPI capabilities of the Moodle learning management system.

Quick technical background: xAPI is a data standard that ensures a common and interoperable format for learning activity data (in other words, data about what a learner does either in a digital environment or as recorded by digital means such as via a rubric on a tablet). The xAPI data standard is central to what is called the “Total Learning Architecture” or TLA. The TLA is a standards-based data paradigm for learning technology ecosystems.

This upgrade increased the xAPI data output of Moodle to 135 trackable events – across learner, instructor, and admin activities and down to the granularity of individual quiz questions and answers. This means an instructor or instructional designer has the ability to fine-tune measurement to a degree never before seen (either to make more relevant reports, or to use incoming data to automate processes and make interventions or adaptations or “next steps”, or even to fill in the data required by a competency assertion system). Because of this upgrade, the overall analytics potential of Moodle has increased 4x and specific attention was paid to the quality of the data output – especially with regards to the management of learner identity and to semantic disambiguation. The capabilities are delivered via the official Moodle xAPI plugin and are available to all Moodle implementations.

In terms of value add: beyond the obvious advantage of having access to more data, there are a number of benefits related to specific use cases of Moodle. Over the next few articles, we will be looking at a few highlights that can have an impact on learning outcomes in K12, Higher Education, Corporate Learning and Development, and Advanced Training.

Let’s start with K12

While the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has not released much data about the adoption of online learning since the surge in K12 distance learning during the high point of the pandemic, what is known vis-a-vis the events of the year 2020 is that schools both public and private were able to deliver instruction via online formats – with 77% of the former and 73% of the latter going that route.

There is, of course, a difference between the ability to deliver instruction and the efficacy of doing so. Research subsequent to the pandemic’s height suggests that among other things – like increasing digital literacy skills and enhancing teacher professional development to support their work in online environments – expanding the access to the infrastructure of online learning is core to mitigating future challenges.

We take that to mean that K12 education deserves increased access to the infrastructure – specifically the applications, database management tools, and standards-based data logistics capabilities – that comprise modern technology ecosystems and data architectures. In our view, “access” is improved by the inclusion and support of standards-based open source software and consensus-driven data models.

As an open source learning management system with a long track record of implementation and a robust user community, Moodle meets some of these requirements out-of-the-box. With the inclusion of the updated xAPI capabilities, there is significant optimization in the ability to access the data of learner, instructor, and administrator activities formative to understanding where one is in relation to positive learning outcomes. That these capabilities are optimized in a manner that is standards-compliant and vendor-neutral should be both a cost and confidence benefit to most IT implementation teams.

If the goal is to improve the infrastructure required to support increased efficacy and expanded access, then one could do much worse than to implement proven standards-based and open source capabilities that have been field tested and built for scalability in real world environments – there are over 400 million Moodle users and xAPI is a global standard backed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (the same org that brought you WiFi).

In implementations across government, commercial, and education sectors, these solutions have been proven to be able to meet the complex security, privacy, and data throughput challenges of sophisticated enterprise use cases. In fact, the xAPI-enabled Moodle environment can serve as a starting point for a comprehensive standards-based data architecture for online learning.

Inclusive of learning experience data, metadata about learning content and instruction, reusable machine-readable assets for assessing a framework of competencies (especially useful in supporting the personalization of educator professional development), and structured learner records conducive to streamlining the process of deriving where a learner is on their educational journey, a data architecture such as this can serve a variety of needs. These include:

• validating access to and attainment of learner-centric and outcomes-focused professional development at the highest level for all teachers and administrators,

• ensuring the interoperability of a district’s portfolio of software subscriptions (or, providing insight into the requirements necessary to map usage and outcomes across apps),

• and – over time – personalizing the development of learner-centric profiles central to scaling up the quality of a system that can identify near real-time academic interventions, interest-driven opportunities, and points-of-entry to jobs and future schooling for all students.

Take Away

Implementation of an xAPI-enabled Moodle environment can serve as a key resource and a baseline model for the technical infrastructure of a district requiring distance learning options.

It is a starting point.

And it is a good starting point, because, as an open source model supported by consensus-based global data standards, it provides a way to mitigate common challenges faced by K12 education customers – such as vendor lock-in – and it does so in a manner that ensures customer access to and ownership of their data. If properly implemented, an open source system like that described here will provide the customer not just with the basic summation data that they’ve become accustomed to for the purpose of generating reports, but all of the log data and learner activity data – in standards-compliant structured ontological formats easily portable to other systems and databases – that are necessary for any serious application of artificial intelligence or anything remotely as sophisticated as the personalization of professional development for educators via adaptive instructional systems (AIS) and business-level competency assertion.

Further, the model provides districts and schools with options. There are many service providers well-equipped to implement Moodle and xAPI – meaning prospective clients have options and can better align what’s out there with what their budgets will allow. Additionally, because the solutions are open source, the education customer is not stuck with one proprietary vendor. If they encounter problems with the quality of service that they receive, they can move on and find another vendor capable of working on the same open source projects without any fear of losing either data or the value of investment made thus far. For those K12 districts considering how to position their online learning options, the standards-based open source approach of Moodle + xAPI offers distinct advantages.