How to achieve competence storage with xAPI

[Jérôme Bajou]

Hi guys,

I need to store competences obtained by an Agent through Activities progression and then, output statistics to the trainer (this trainee has gained 60% of this competence, i.e. has done 60% of all activities giving this competence available to him).

In order to do that, I would like to exchange some ideas with you. Here are my problematics:

- Where/How to store the information that Activity A is about Competence C ?

I was thinking about storing this information as an extension of the Activity. But since the competence is depending on the Result in the given Statement (completion field to be precise), maybe I have something to store in the Result of the Statement.

- How to query the competences by Agent ?

If I store the competence gained in the extensions of the Result of the given Statement, Statement API doesn't give an easy way to request this: "get all Statement where the Extension of the Result is talking about Competence C".

I though I could use the Agent Profile API to store the Agent Competences where profileId would be an easy way to retrieve the given Competence (and I could get all Activities Id in the body of the Agent Profile answer).

- How to query the Activities giving this Competence ?

This part is highly dependent on how I will store the competences. Maybe I should use the Activity Profile API to store the competences given by each activity...

Thank you in advance for your thoughts and much appreciated help.

Regards,

Jerome

[Andrew]

Hi Jerome, 

I recommend that you use context activities. You can then query the statements API using the related activities flag. 

Andrew

[jonathan.p...@adlnet.gov]

Hi Jerome -

Agree with Andrew that context activities are a good place for this right now.  However, I've seen folks hard-code competency ID's in their statements only to have a chunk of content used out of the original context making this reference no longer valid (or partially valid).   

ADL is working on a few new efforts specifically around competencies.  These efforts are to work in conjunction with xAPI and could eventually provide a longer-term solution to your problem.  If you are interested, there is a kick-off meeting coming soon.  Here's the announcement -

Interested in contributing to the next big thing at ADL?
The learning community has witnessed several competency efforts over the years, including some with standardized representations of competencies and competency frameworks. However, the community is largely fragmented based on their individual competency model requirements and the technology they choose to implement. ADL is ready to engage the community as we begin to incorporate the work of the many experts and organizations already involved in competency-based education and training.

To start our competency efforts, we invite you to join us for the community launch of one of our first efforts, the Competency and Skills System (CASS) project.
 

Join us!
Please register for CASS Community Launch, taking place on May 24, 2016 15:00 EDT: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/8342488775157638916
(After registering, you should receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.) 

If you are unable to join using GoToWebinar due to your organization's security policies, please use this alternative: 

1. Call in to the teleconference number given above through the registration process.
2. Follow along using the slides sent in advance to all attendees.

 

About CASS 
The CASS project is specifically focused on competency portability, competency reporting, and resource alignment. It will result in a unified approach to alignment for all competencies (no matter what structure they take).The goal of the CASS project is to research and develop an open source Competency and Skills System (CASS) that organizations and software applications can use to define, manage, and apply competencies and skills. The intended result is a critical piece of infrastructure that enables competencies, competency frameworks, and competency-based learner models to be managed and accessed as persistent objects that exist independently of a learning management system, course, training program, or credential.

[Jessie Chuang]

Hi

This is an important question. I think there is more than only one way to do it, as long as you know how you are structuring it.

Just like to share how we think about this, input welcome:

• Many contents and activities are already aligned to knowledge/competency map when they are designed/created. In this case, we use "object.extensions" (we have a key for that: http://w3id.org/xapi/acrossx/extensions/alignment) to indicate its alignment.
• For above case, when an actor is doing the activity, "result" should be used to record how he's performing with it; some cases might need an extra extension key in result to express his performance level (like 1~5, with clear definition on each level)
• In some cases, single activity itself isn't aligned with competency map, but designers could compose several activities together for a specific competency node - we call it a plan (we provide a free learning designer tool for that), for statements from these activities the plan id should be sent in "context.contextactivities.parent" so that these statements are linked to that plan, and of course that plan is aligned to a competency node. And how the actor performed on that competency can be summarized from all related statements(no matter auto-grading or evaluated by instructor) according to rubric.

Jessie Chuang

www.classroom-aid.com

Twitter : ClassroomAidInc

Make Learning Big Data Work for You

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[Steve Flowers]

Both of these cases are interesting. I think I get what you're saying but it'd be great to see an example of a construction that employed context activities and another that employs the extensions that Jessie references.

Jessie and Andrew, do you have some examples of each of these in practice? 

[Jérôme Bajou]

Hello,

Thank you all for your reply.

I actually didn't think about context activities in such a case, but I think this is a good idea. I would love to see an example of a statement too!

Thank you!

[jonathan.p...@adlnet.gov]

HI all -

Context activities (for referencing competencies) work in small, controlled use cases but could cause issues at scale.  This is due to a few things including reuse of content and changing competency structures over time.  If competencies are hard-coded into context activities, they could become invalid quickly.

ADL has a proof-of-concept from a year ago (not the recommended way, but shows how you could abstract the competency IDs from the statements) and is working on competency and skills services/system (CASS) as a more thorough solution.

xAPI-Competency Integration (XCI) Demo/Proof-of-Concept

https://github.com/adlnet/xci

CASS Project

http://cassproject.org/

We'll talk more about CASS during the webinar listed above.

I hope this helps.

[Andrew]

Hi Steve, 

I don't have any examples of context extensions for competencies in practice that I can share. 

The approach we take with Watershed is to allow you to define competencies as part of report settings. The report could be configured to look for a particular competency assertion within the statement, or just some other property/properties such as an activity id and score. That solves the problem Jono raised of competencies changing definition after experience has been gained, but it does mean you can't easily move the competency definition to another LRS. To be fair, we haven't seen any clients wanting to move competency definitions between LRSs yet either and they're likely to be much smaller in number than statements so recreating them is less of a task. 

Andrew