The xAPI Plug-in for the world’s most-installed open source LMS gets an upgrade
For much of the last year, our team at Yet has been engaged in the development of a major upgrade of the xAPI plug-in for the open source Moodle LMS.
Two days ago, our work — nearly 50,000 lines of code additions and changes — was merged into the official plug-in.
And what is the result of this work?
The updated plug-in provides the ability to track about 135 different logstore events as xAPI data. This includes tracking learner, instructor, and admin behaviors. And it covers all LMS functionality — from creating courses to modifying calendars to engaging in forums to taking a quiz. For the first time, xAPI data granularity on the platform is offered at the level of individual questions and responses.
Why is this significant?
Foremost, this puts xAPI functionality directly into the hands of a lot of people. It aligns with our team’s mission to make data more accessible and actionable. But also it should be noted that the xAPI updates go beyond just the addition of trackable events — rather, they were developed with the intent to improve the quality of the output data itself. Quality data is more important than lots of data.
Who’s using it?
Right now, the updated plug-in is implemented in the Enterprise Digital Learning Modernization effort run by Advanced Distributed Learning. In this implementation, xAPI data is sent from Moodle, via the plug-in, to SQL LRS.
And, more broadly speaking, this is what we call a “big deal” if you are a Learning Engineering team in the middle of a Moodle data instrumentation project.
What’s next?
Now that the upgrades have been merged into the official plug-in, LMS administrators have the ability to open the plug-in and turn on the new xAPI capabilities. Given that there are over 430 million Moodle users, we could soon see a considerable uptick in the amount of quality xAPI data generated globally.
As for Yet, we’re continuing to work on new data instrumentations for new technologies. This plug-in update is our most recent — following our xAPI instrumentation of VLC media player for offline video capture and our simple instrumentation of Unity for xAPI tracking in mixed reality environments.
We know that some of you reading this are offering learning technologies of your own. Reach out and let’s talk about what it would take to instrument or upgrade the xAPI instrumentation of your platforms.