A Teacher’s Story

Meredith is a teacher in a xAPI-enabled classroom.

She doesn’t do roll call every morning, the students’ GPS enabled tablets take care of that for her. Her students have lots of apps and devices by which they learn and generate learning data. Lots of learning data. But guess what? All of that data from all of the different apps, devices, and activities all lives in one system.

Modern teachers have many systems and apps that they use for teaching, testing and maintaining the classroom. Most of these systems have their own logins and their own reporting systems. To make meaningful use of all of the data that teachers collect is a pain — lots of CSV exports with fields that never match up between systems. In the xAPI enabled classroom, all of the data is stored in one place, in one format, and it’s easy to see the big picture of teaching and learning.

If one student is performing phenomenally, Meredith can see what that student has been reading and Googling. From one place, she can monitor students as they research or take tests, and intervene when necessary. She can make assignments and track completion of those assignments from one place.

Games have been used for a long time in the classroom, but now learning via games can be tracked in a xAPI system and live alongside all of the other learning data.

If Meredith assigns a team project, that team and the individual members of that team can all be tracked and reported against.

If a student goes above and beyond on his/her own to learn something about a specific topic, Meredith can see that and qualify that activity as being helpful or not helpful to the student’s performance. …And she might even find some new teaching resources while she’s at it.

Meredith can see all of a student’s past learning experiences, including those from previous years of schooling.

Everything can be tracked — the regular stuff, as well as informal learning and everything in between — from student attendance to completed assignments, from what students are “Googling” to how they performed at “real world” activities in physical education classes. It all lives in one system, so different learning metrics can be compared and reported against, opening up a big picture of teaching and learning that never existed before. The technology gets out of the way, so Meredith can spend her time being a teacher.

The next-generation classroom is powered by the Experience API.