According to xAPI.com, a Learning Record Store (LRS) is the heart of any xAPI ecosystem. Essentially, xAPI-enabled applications generate metadata in the form of ‘statements.’ The application sends these statements to an LRS server, which then receives, stores, and forwards them to other LRS servers.
With an LRS server and strong analytical reporting tools, you can capture information about any experience, regardless of where or in what format it occurs. An LRS is a standardized tool for receiving, storing, and forwarding metadata for a wide variety of activities and events that may or may not be delivered and tracked within your learning management system (LMS).
xAPI-enabled applications can include, but are not limited to:
…and many other offline, real-world experiences that a learner may encounter. By gathering data about all experiences, you can better measure the business impact of your training resources to determine which methods and tools are most effective.
For example…. one organization may require all employees to take a course in cyber security and then measure the effectiveness of that content by sending out a company-wide phishing email as a ‘test’ to see how well staff follow the security protocol covered during their training.
Another organization may follow up on training provided to its sales teams by reviewing xAPI data generated from its corporate CRM to determine the impact of training and assign additional learning interventions as needed to improve results and productivity.
Business unit leaders are not interested in post-training satisfaction surveys and comments on how the learners felt after completing the course or taking a test. Instead, they want insightful details on the impact of training on the business and how it is helping to achieve corporate goals – or, in the public sector, a government agency’s mission.
To better position your training team within your organization, determine which types of information yield accurate insights and pave the way for improvements and real change. You may want to ask questions like:
How has training impacted customer satisfaction levels?
What training do our most effective sales reps use?
Are resellers driving more revenue post-training? If so, how long after training is completed are increased revenues sustained?
Next, think about what data you need to answer those questions and what systems you need to enable to capture it. xAPI, via the LRS, provides an easy, standards-based way to capture that data. Rather than investing in an expensive, one-off custom data integration project, you can use xAPI statements to send the information to an LRS. You can combine it with existing LMS data to close the loop and get a complete picture.
