I’m super excited about the latest recipe we’ve published on the registry! Not only is it a great recipe tackling an important use case, but it was written by adopters who needed it for a real project. It was written incredibly rapidly, going from first draft to ready-to-try in less than two weeks. This blog gives you the details.
Sometimes when I talk to people about recipes, they’re disappointed to hear that there isn’t yet a recipe for the use case they are interested in. “Don’t worry!” I always console them, “You can write your own.” TES took that advice to heart and one of the first things they did after hiring a developer to take xAPI further in their app was to draft up a recipe covering the events they wanted to track. In this case, attendance at events such as meetings, classroom sessions, conferences, etc.
The actual recipe can be found here in the registry. The recipe is split into ‘Simple Attendance’ which uses a single statement to record that a group attended the event, and ‘Detailed Attendance’ which is used to record more events such as scheduling, registering, joining and leaving. It’s envisaged that some recipe adopters will implement only Simple Attendance whilst others will compliment it with the nuances captured by Detailed Attendance statements.
The bulk of the recipe was written by Sean Donaghy of TES. I helped by reviewing each iteration and making a couple of edits where it was faster to make the change directly than write up an explanation. I’m very happy to help anybody who wants help with reviewing a recipe they’re working on.
This first release of the recipe is considered an alpha version. Aside from the TES developers who are busily implementing the recipe in their product, nobody else has tried the recipe yet. There are likely some changes to come as implementers run into challenges we couldn’t predict. If you do implement the recipe, we really appreciate your comments and feedback. You’ll use the recipe ids (http://xapi.trainingevidencesystems.com/recipes/attendance/0_0_1#simple and http://xapi.trainingevidencesystems.com/recipes/attendance/0_0_1#detailed) as a “category” Context Activity so that when you upgrade to the final release version of the recipe you can easily identify which statements used which version.
Recipes are really important to ensure your statements can be understood by other tools. If you’re working on a xAPI project and neither following nor writing a recipe, please do get in touch so I can help you.
You can expect this to be the Year of The Recipe for xAPI. We already had the Open Badges recipe last month and there’s a few more in the works that will pop up as the year progresses. Watch this blog for more news sometime soon!
