Sharing Statements:

a Collaborative Project

Andrew Downes

andrew.downes@tincanapi.comhello@learninglocker.net

Ali Shahrazad

ali.shahrazad@saltbox.com

Today’s webinar

Benefits of sharing statements to L&D and the business

Our collaborative project: what we did and what happened

Technical background: how it all works

Time for questions

Benefits

Ali Shahrazad

ali.shahrazad@saltbox.com

Handset &

Service Sales

e-Observation

Forms

Feature & Benefit

Scavenger Hunt

LMS #2 (partner

sales)

LMS #1

(retail/B2B)

Role Play

Guides (forms)

Business

Intelligence

FAQ sheets

(intranet)

Social Business

Community

A Sales Trainer’s Story

Formal training not enough

Custom mobile app

Online resources

Leadership engagement

Business outcomes

Handset &

Service Sales

Observation

Forms

Feature & Benefit Scavenger Hunt

(mobile app)

LMS #2 (partner

sales)

LMS #1

(retail/B2B)

Role Play

Guides (forms)

BI Reporting

Tool

FAQ sheets

(intranet)

Social Business

Community

A Sales Trainer’s Story

Invested a bunch of

money & time

Handset &

Service Sales

Observation

Forms

Feature & Benefit Scavenger Hunt

(mobile app)

LMS #2 (partner

sales)

LMS #1

(retail/B2B)

Role Play

Guides (forms)

BI Reporting

Tool

FAQ sheets

(intranet)

Social Business

Community

A Sales Trainer’s Story

IT Business Analyst

(reporting & integration)

Pain Points

What if we had a new analyst or LMS?

Expensive to manually integrate applications

Business analysts don’t scale well

I wasn’t the only one. Multiple regions

Content/apps didn’t exchange information

Sometimes took 4-6 weeks to get reporting

Why Statement Sharing?

Organisation

LRS

Vendor

LRS

LRSs owned by different

stakeholders

LMS

External

LRSLRS

Getting data out

of (or into) an LMS

New LRSOld

LRS

Migrating to a new system

Some

Other

System

LRS

Pushing data to another non-LRS

system

LRSLRS LRS

LRSLRS LRS

An organisation has multiple LRS.

What we did

Andrew Downes

andrew.downes@tincanapi.com

Project background

Four main goals:

● Test the specification

● Test our LRSs

● Promote collaboration

● Promote the concept

Step 1: Initial Investigation

Step 1: Initial Investigation

Step 1: Initial Investigation

It sort of worked...

● Statements went to all the places they were

supposed to!

But...

● The two way syncing only worked 1 way at a time!

● Some statements always failed.

● The system had to be reset after each batch of

statements.

We had some work to do...

Step 2: Things to fix

● Developers worked independently on each LRS (no

communication between them)

● Improvements were proposed for the specification

and conformance suite.

● I fixed some issues with the Golf Prototype

Time to try again...

Step 3: Final proof of concept

E-learning

course (Golf example)

BookmarkletLaunched

Statements displayedTracked Tracked

Statements queried

Statements queried

Statements pushed

LMS

It worked!

Golf example statements...

Bookmarklet statements...

Lessons Learnt

● The spec is robust

● Interoperability is hard

● Sharing statements is not the hard bit!

● Pushing is better than pulling

How it works

Six ways to share

One LRS pushes

statements to another

LRS LRS

One LRS queries (pulls)

Statements from another

LRS LRS

Two way sharing

(both LRS push or pull)

LRS LRS

Two way sharing

(one LRS pushes and pulls)

LRS LRS

Man-in-the-middle

LRS LRS

Statement

sharing

tool

Download and upload

Statements as a file

LRS LRSJSON

file

One Way Sharing

● All statements in the first LRS

sent to the second.

● Statements do not go the other

way.

● Useful for a central LRS

collecting from multiple sources

or migrating LRS.

● The pushing/pulling LRS plays

the role of an activity provider

sending or retrieving

statements.

Two Way Sharing

● All statements from each LRS

are shared with the other.

● Useful for systems that need to

be kept in sync.

Man-in-the-middle application

● Stand alone application

specifically for moving

statements around

● Doesn’t store statements itself

● Doesn’t exist as a product

today

(aka Statement Piping)

Download and upload

● Useful for one-off batches

● Direct connection between LRS

not required

● Useful for backup and

migration

How does the spec ensure

interoperability?

● Common data structure. Statements have a defined

set of properties.

● Common data transfer mechanism, Statements are

sent and received in the same way.

● Special rules for handling conflicting and duplicate

statements; allows for two way sharing.

Not just statements

There’s other types of data to consider sharing:

● Canonical activity definitions

● Documents e.g. bookmarking data

● Person information

Poll: Which are you most interested in?

● Getting data from many sources into an LRS for

analytics.

● Pushing data about e-learning courses into another

system.

● Migrating all of my learning data into a new LRS.

Next steps