xAPI officially Becomes a Published IEEE Standard

On October 10th, the Experience API (xAPI) officially became an open source standard through the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Learning Technology Standards Committee (LTSC). This new standard “IEEE 9274.1.1-2023” – also referred to as xAPI 2.0 – will be the first open-source standard in the history of IEEE.

The xAPI is a software specification that was developed by the ADL Initiative to capture learner performance across the lifecycle of learning. Originally developed through the ADL’s Project TinCan, xAPI leveraged a decade of lessons learned from the Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) resulting in xAPI 1.0 being released in 2013. The xAPI 2.0 standard was formally approved on March 30th, however, additional work was required to designate xAPI 2.0 as an open source standard. This release represents a substantial milestone for distributed learning communities across the globe and will improve the quality of learner data being generated by a wide range of digital learning systems and content.

To assist the community with its transition to xAPI 2.0, ADL Initiative will be publishing technical guidance for LRS developers and LRS consumers looking to update their systems.  The ADL Initiative has already updated the xAPI Adopter Registry and the public LRS Conformance Test Suite to support xAPI 2.0. ADL’s publicly available sample LRS has also been updated. In addition, the official IEEE xAPI 2.0 repository is now available. ADL Initiative will be archiving the xAPI 1.0.3 version that was available within the ADL Initiative’s Github. Please plan to use the new xAPI 2.0 repository moving forward.

For more information on this significant accomplishment, please refer to ADL Initiative’s previous article on the IEEE efforts.