Recipe for Success - Lessons learnt from using xAPI within the connected learning analytics toolkit

An ongoing challenge for Learning Analytics research has been the scalable derivation of user interaction data from multiple technologies. The complexities associated with this challenge are increasing as educators embrace an ever grow- ing number of social and content-related technologies. The Experience API (xAPI) alongside the development of user specific record stores has been touted as a means to ad- dress this challenge, but a number of subtle considerations must be made when using xAPI in Learning Analytics. This paper provides a general overview to the complexities and challenges of using xAPI in a general systemic analytics solution - called the Connected Learning Analytics (CLA) toolkit. The importance of design is emphasised, as is the notion of common vocabularies and xAPI Recipes. Early decisions about vocabularies and structural relationships be- Tween statements can serve to either facilitate or handicap later analytics solutions. The CLA toolkit case study pro- vides us with a way of examining both the strengths and the weaknesses of the current xAPI specification, and we con- clude with a proposal for how xAPI might be improved by using JSON-LD to formalise Recipes in a machine readable form.