Tin Can / xAPI -- LRS Recommendations and Feedback

Hi Matt, we have had some internal discussion about this, not just with products, but also with the entire site. We would love to hear about your use cases for this kind of feature. That information would be very helpful in scoping this out further.

Thanks for the update, Perry. I think that's a great idea. There's a lot of learning that can be experienced on a website outside the construct of a formal learning product. I'm not sure I made my secondary question clear though and probably should've avoided the word 'product'. Tin Can and LRSs are still evolving, but there are LMS systems that have built-in LRS capabilities for receiving/storing Tin Can statements. That's what I'm curious about. Right now to utilize Tin Can we are required to have an external LRS endpoint. I'd prefer to see one built-in to LC. LRS data is portable and that's great in a lot of use cases, but I have security/privacy concerns over sending and storing data on yet another platform. For those clients who are using external LRSs, statement forwarding can still be leveraged so they can continue to receive their data there as well.

Hi Perry -- can you share where this functionality is on the roadmap? Is this expected in the next couple of sprints? Or still in the early stages of discussion?

Matt, Sounds like we are talking about two things; an embedded LRS in LC and extended LRS integration.
The Xerox Learning team has been evaluating 3 LRS vendors for internal and for external use when building solutions. I've learned that their current favorite is Watershed LRS. You are right in that the LRS market is volatile and quickly changing so that could change 6 months from now. At the moment there are no plans to include an LRS directly into Learner Community.
We are exploring extending our LRS integration capabilities to work outside of content packages. This will allow you to track all of the informal learning and other analytic data through tin can statements. We talked about this capability some at the Users Group this year as a possible enhancement for 2016, but it is still too early. Ping me as you get deeper into the LRS discovery process and we can work together to mold what the expanded LRS integration looks like.

All-- I just wanted to throw into this conversation the little I know (or believe I know) about this topic. It appears that some LMSs that claim TinCan functionality are only capable of receiving SCORM-equivalent statements (Completion Status, score, exit, etc.). I've been looking at a few external LRSs like Wax (Saltbox), GrassBlade and Watershed (Rustici). We were leaning toward Watershed, but it does not offer a graduated pricing approach and it seems more expensive (that is, if you are wanting to experiment first). You can experiment with their free version on SCORM-Cloud. I am a little concerned with the recent sale of Rustici, so we will need to see what direction they take now. Wax and a few others offer a free version and/or a monthly subscription which allows you to get started at a lower initial investment. The free versions typically have limited capabilities (naturally). I am looking into an installed solution for our servers. -- My 2-cents...

Likewise, the content development tools that offer xAPI functionality typically only pass SCORM-equivalent statements. I have been able to create custom (non-SCORM) xAPI statements in Captivate, StoryLine, and hand-coded HTML courses and pass them to the LRS (on their servers) for storage, but I too am concerned about sending/storing statements externally. For now, I am just sending faked info and pulling it back with a dashboard display. For the immediate future, it seems we may need to store things in 2 places-- give to the LMS what is the LMS's, and the other statements will be stored elsewhere. Not a great solution, but we are still experimenting and the future is still evolving.

Thanks for your insight, Gary. Faking some of the data is an interesting approach to limit exposure externally. Even in a fluid and evolving environment, data security is the one that will never go away. I also share your desire to keep investment costs low, particularly while experimenting and implementing our first xAPI course. One of the nice benefits of SCORM Cloud is their commitment (for now -- http://tincanapi.com/hosted-lrs/pricing/) to accept/store externally generated statements free of charge. That makes it an enticing fit for Learner Community's model, but retrieving information for reporting may become cumbersome and negate any cost savings compared to more full featured LRSs. As you noted, "free" always comes with an asterisk. It will be very interesting to see in next 2-3 years whether the industry settles a bit.