An Update on xAPI Design Cohorts -- ADL Net

Anthony Altieri’s custom, limited edition Odroid learning record store – showcased at xAPI Bootcamp 2015.

The past

ADL Initiative has run Experience API (xAPI) Design Cohorts for the past three years. The xAPI Design Cohorts were virtually collaborative experiences—chances for anyone interested in learning technology to work on designing and developing for the xAPI. Over a period of 14 weeks, participants worked in teams using xAPI to tackle a variety of learning and performance problems.

Past design cohort groups have worked on a variety of problems, including:

• Tracking social media platform interactions (xAPI meets Twitter)
• Enabling e-book communication with multiple endpoints (IEEE Actionable Data Book)
• Recording learning results of an HTML-based learning module experience (World of xAPICraft)
• A profile/proof-of-concept for using xAPI to track activities in augmented reality
• Combining xAPI and the Internet of Things in order to track and support new hire orientation activities (xAPI Gnome)

The entire experience typically ended with an xAPI BootCamp, where participants met (in person!) to present their projects to their peers. (Last year’s xAPI Bootcamp was a huge success! Thanks to everyone who participated.)

Today

As our friend Megan Bowe recently put it:

The growth in xAPI adoption and the increasing demand for the program became more than ADL Initiative’s dedicated xAPI team could sustain.

More to the point, we began to see some marvelous things happening in the xAPI world that, frankly, we can’t (and wouldn’t want to) control. Whether it’s through the increased incidence of xAPI-focused events, workshops, meetups (we see you, Seattle!), working groups (vocabulary, cmi5, etc.), resources, adopters, or ADL Community Working Groups, we’re excited to see the worldwide xAPI community start taking on responsibilities for determining where and how far it will go.

As a result, ADL Initiative will—for now—not be running xAPI Design Cohorts or Bootcamps, though we do have some surprises in store for 2016 – stay tuned…

Wait – What? Why?

Because someone is already handling this better than we can:

…we’ve decided to host an xAPI Learning Cohort, starting in February [2016]. We’re firing up our bat signal and inviting anyone who is curious, has questions about, or is currently exploring xAPI to join us.

Yes! Our xAPI Gnome friends up in The Mitten are kicking off their first public, virtual participation (like ours!) xAPI Learning Cohort on February 11, 2016. To learn more, please read the organizer’s blog post.