Adventures in the xAPI: The Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum Project by Megan Torrance

“In a SCORM world, a user must generally be logged into a system to record their individual progress and interactions. But the xAPI allows us to record the activity of anonymous users in any location, a choice you could make due to privacy concerns or just to make it easier to gather anonymous data without a complex system of authentication that can slow down user interaction (especially kids running around a science museum).”

As the eLearning world begins to adopt and develop the xAPI standard, it’s not hard to find products, tools, and platforms that offer xAPI compliance. But as an industry, the xAPI is still new enough that it’s hard to find actual examples of it at work in the real world. And yet, those stories are important cases to guide us as we move forward. This is the first article in an “adventure series” that will explore the xAPI in its natural habitat.

If you’ll forgive me, in the first couple of stories I’ll share projects my team is working on. After that, the sky’s the limit, the more the merrier, and so on. Do you have stories to share? Drop me a line—I’d love to hear what you’re doing and help you share your story.

(This project won the first xAPI Hyperdrive at DevLearn in October, 2014.)

The Hands-On Museum is a children’s STEaM (science, technology, engineering, art, math) museum based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA. Museum educators were eager to offer an enhanced field trip experience for school children, one that would show quantitative data related to the learning experience and the science standards that schools and teachers are held to. At the same time, they wanted to provide a richer experience at each exhibit, slowing the kids down long enough to interact meaningfully with the exhibit and learn something more.

To do so, the museum would need to track which students were at which exhibits and what they did there. The resulting data also helps teachers tie their museum field trip visits to curriculum standards to ensure that their time (and their budget) is spent meaningfully. The RFED project is an ongoing effort to meet all these needs and, at the same time, explore some cool technology and connect with the community. (RFED is a play on the underlying RFID technology and ED for education.)

In the first iteration of this project, the museum used RFID tags embedded into nametag lanyards to passively log students into each exhibit as they came into range of a wall-mounted antenna. Here's how it works: As the children come into range, a tablet computer mounted nearby greets them by name and engages them in a short series of questions and explorations with the exhibit, which is typically an analog device of some sort (Figure 1).

Figure 1: As the children come into range, a tablet computer mounted nearby greets them by name and engages them in a short series of questions and explorations with the exhibit

Data from each student activity is then sent back to the LRS (Learning Record Store) immediately after the student(s) complete the interaction, or after they “log out” by leaving the area (as determined by the antenna). Teachers and museum staff can then access a dashboard showing an activity stream and some simple data visualizations by student and by exhibit. A simple search function allows teachers to search for specific text strings found in either the xAPI statements or in the text responses typed in by students.

As this project moves into Phase 2, the somewhat finicky RFID technology is being replaced by beacons that offer more granular proximity tracking and a more robust signal. As it turns out, kids wiggle a lot and don’t stand with their name badges neatly lined up in front of an antenna. Go figure!

View the original article here