Aaron Silvers, President and Managing Director of DISC, the Data Interoperability Standards Consortium, was fundamental to the development of xAPI by the ADL. This presentation highlights DISC's activities under the remit of the ADL to define standardization processes and test suites as well as guiding the development of xAPI protocols, such as cmi5.

1. The State of Standardization
April 27, 2017 - xAPI LIVE
Aaron E. Silvers, Executive Director

2. The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative is the part of the US Department of Defense that governs xAPI (the
spec, its conformance requirements and the conformance test for LRSs).

3. DISC is the 501(c)6 not-for-profit organization bringing vendors & stakeholders around the world and across industries to
work on xAPI and steer its evolution.

4. Mission
Our mission is to create a data ecosystem where
systems can be successfully designed, built, and
grown on common expectations of data.

5. Partners & Contributors
• Learning and Performance Activity Providers like
Aquafadas, Cognitive Advisors, domiKnow, iSpring,
Trivantis and Digital Chalk
• Learning Management Systems like Risc, Inc and
OnPoint
• LRS Providers like HT2, Rustici Software,
Watershed and Yet Analytics
• Service Providers developing bespoke, custom
solutions like Obsidian Learning, Torrance
Learning, Riptide Software, MakingBetter,
Raytheon, Conduent

6. Stakeholders
• Governments like the US, the UK, Brazil, France,
Finland, the Netherlands, South Africa and South
Korea
• Corporations like Amazon, AT&T, IBM, Autodesk,
Boeing, Raytheon, Intel and Microsoft
• Higher Education stakeholders like IMS, Jisc and
KERIS
• Human Resources concerns like HR Open Standards,
LinkedIn and Workday
• Medical concerns like Johns Hopkins, Lurie
Childrens Hospital, Mayo Clinic, MedBiquitous and
University of Michigan School of Nursing
• Publishing concerns like Elsevier, Pearson and Wiley
• Standards bodies like IEEE, OASIS and ISO

7. More than just instruction, design skills are needed more than ever.
xAPI helps frame a data ecosystem.

8. Tenets of a Data Ecosystem
Understanding
With complex, emergent
networks, understanding data is
made possible when the
transaction formats for data
exchange are known to all.
DISC is where different
communities of practice make
their rules for exchanging data
explicit.

9. Tenets of a Data Ecosystem
Meaning
To gain insight, data
must be packed with the
context needed to make
sense of it.
DISC will provide lookup
services across communities of
practice to manage, maintain and
deconflict vocabularies and
ontologies.

10. Tenets of a Data Ecosystem
Data is unreliable without assurance that
it’s credible, accurate, unaltered, relevant
and ethical.
DISC will work with stakeholder groups to
provide a framework for data movement
permissions, cybersecurity, and
information assurance for data systems.
DISC will provide a Code of Ethics
expected of all data professionals.Security

11. Tenets of a Data Ecosystem
Movement
Only data that is understandable, meaningful and
secure can truly be owned. Having reasonable
and actionable governance rules around how it
can move ensures organizations and individuals
alike have rights common expectations of
access and accountability for data.
DISC will work with stakeholder groups to ensure
organizations can fully realize skill intelligence
while supporting lifelong learning.

12. Tenets of a Data Ecosystem
Meaning
MovementSecurity
Understanding

13. A Data Ecosystem Model
xAPI
Data
Providers
Data
Analysis
Data
Warehouses
Profiles
Permissions &
Privacy Framework
Persistent Vocabulary
Identifiers
Specifications for Profiles
and their supporting
services
Skill Relationships
Frameworks
Cybersecurity &
Information Assurance
Professional Certification
Code of Ethics
Software Certification

14. Who benefits from standards for
learning and performance data?

15. Vendors
Besides from the near-term market advantages, there’s an
assurance that a documented, commonly implemented and
completely open API is available in any certified software
and xAPI Profile services make automating best practices
easier, scalable and resilient.
Who Benefits?

16. Who Benefits?
Data Analysts
Data Analysts would be able to take advantage of lookup
services available to xAPI Profiles, helping people gain
consistent & reliable insights to commonly defined
benchmarks.

17. Who Benefits?
Organizations
With industry certification comes savings in terms of
resources spent on maintaining a spiderweb of custom
solutions. Turn-key integration AND semantic
interoperability changes their game.

18. Who Benefits?
The Public Good
Helping professionals improve their work and their lives with
tools, skills and ethics that help all people gain agency in an
increasingly complex digital world. Profiles promote a
consistent and reliable interpretation of data.

19. How is a Data Ecosystem Built?
● *Conformance
● *Certification
● *Profile and Recipe Specification
● Content Strategy
● Data Creator Registration
● CoP, Profile, and Recipe Registration
● Movement Permissioning and Recording
* Active development in FY16-17

20. How is all this getting
“standardized?”

21. What does DISC do?
● DISC organizes communities that contribute to data interoperability-related projects
● As a 501(c)6 trade organization, DISC provides unbiased facilitation, as a third-party, for multiple
organizations to work together on shared, complex challenges around data exchange
● DISC researches and reports credible information about the practice, trade and market related to
data interoperability
● DISC works with partners, like ADL, to augment their capacity to develop data interoperability
efforts.

22. How does DISC help?
● DISC facilitates project work that supports industry and/or practice that is
too complex to take on independently.
● Our work with ADL since 2016 follows this approach.

23. Why is DISC needed?
● The xAPI Community of adopters, practitioners and stakeholders became
more active
● xAPI is more complex than how it started as an applied R&D project

24. Who joins DISC?
Individuals, Stakeholders and Trade Organizations and Vendors join, retain or
partner with DISC.
More information on membership is here:
http://datainteroperability.org/membership

25. Who’s governing DISC?
● Megan Bowe (Vice-President), MakingBetter
● Eric Nehrlich (Treasurer), Google
● Brenda Sanderson, IxDA
● Robert Todd, Learning Inventions
● Kirsty Kitto, University of Sydney
● Aaron E. Silvers (President, Executive Director)

26. Just to catch up...
Since July 2016, DISC has worked with the xAPI Community to tackle two major
efforts on behalf of ADL:
● xAPI Conformance Requirements for LRSs
● xAPI Functional Certification Program Research and Recommendations

27. xAPI Profiles

28. What are xAPI Profiles?
From the spec, an xAPI Profile is
“a specific set of rules and documentation for implementing xAPI in a particular
context. Profiles generally provide a particular vocabulary of terms, some
created specifically for the profile, and some are referenced from other
vocabularies.”

29. Why are xAPI Profiles needed?
1. Data meant to reflect the same activity often doesn’t match.
2. Communities of Practice lack shared practices (among each other) in their
definitions of human activity, performance and outcomes.
These two challenges make working with xAPI really hard.

30. Example: xAPI without Profiles
Keara uses Storyline to create a job aid for Customer Service Representatives to work with the
company’s Knowledge Base. She publishes this job aid to use xAPI.
That Knowledge Base incorporates xAPI, and ideally Keara should be able to get a report on the use of
the job aid in relation to the Knowledge Base use it supports.
But the activity identifiers don’t match, and Keara relies on the LMS to create reports - she has no
control over how Storyline identifies the interactions in the job aid and even if she could figure out how
Storyline identifies them, she has no control over how the Knowledge Base identifies its activity, so the
LMS can’t correlate the two activities and Keara can’t report on this without manually looking at the
statements, cleaning up the data, and ultimately create her own report in Excel -- a very big time-suck.

31. Same Example, but with xAPI Profiles
Keara uses Storyline to create a job aid for Customer Service Representatives to work with the
company Knowledge Base. Storyline pulls information from a Profile service and offers Keara a
options to autofill her job aid with appropriate statements to reflect how the company wants to report
on the Knowledge Base. She publishes this job aid to use xAPI.
That Knowledge Base incorporates xAPI and when it was incorporated, the developers used the same
profile in their tools to describe the user of the Knowledge Base.
Keara relies on the LMS, which references the Profile to identify statements that are important and
report appropriately on how the job aid use correlates to the use of the Knowledge Base. She could
also include on other training developed using that profile in relation -- easily, quickly and painlessly.

32. Doesn’t xAPI already have Profiles?
Yes, indeedy! There are more than a handful, but their quality (and their amount
of use) is all over the map.
Active Communities of Practice maintaining Profiles include:
● Medical education
● Higher education in the UK
● LMSs and authoring tools working with content via xAPI
● Using xAPI to track Video

33. Wasn’t there already work on this?
Indeed, ADL worked with the xAPI Community to create a companion
specification to address Vocabularies. More than that ADL implemented an
approach to document vocabulary sets for xAPI in formal structures, leveraging
technologies on the server side that can help relate different vocabulary terms
to each other.

34. So why is a new effort needed?
Profiles address more than vocabulary. Different profiles lack shared structure.
These profiles reflect contextual practice:
● Medbiquitous (virtual patients, simulations)
● Jisc (controlled vocabularies describing learning in UK Higher Ed)
These profiles reflect modalities or functions that are used in many contexts:
● cmi5 (describing LMS interactions with content)
● Video (describing… video things)

35. No current profiles are expressed in machine readable ways, so they’re not
super helpful beyond being a reference for implementers to manually
copy-and-paste into their work.
So why is a new effort needed?

36. Profiles are really hard to find unless you know where to look. They’re also hard
to define because (as mentioned earlier) different professions/trades lack
shared approaches to describing learning and performance.
So why is a new effort needed?

37. Even if a Profile currently could define a group of statements as something
significant, like achieving competency, it’s pretty impossible to enforce that
intention without knowing what to look for in ad-hoc or manual ways.
So why is a new effort needed?

38. Wrapping Up

39. Takeaways
● DISC is a member-supported trade organization that takes on really tough
challenges related to data interoperability, brings people together to
produce work that addresses those challenges.
● DISC is about to tackle xAPI Profiles to make it easier for people to work
with xAPI and provide the necessary support, structure and governance.
● DISC needs your help (yes, YOU). Work with us. Join us.
http://datainteroperability.org/membership

40. Questions?
Aaron E. Silvers,
Executive Director
Data Interoperability
Standards Consortium
aaron@datainteroperability.org
@datainterop
http://datainteroperability.org/