Documentation / Platform glossary / xAPI
xAPI, the Experience API, is a specification for recording learning activity as statements of the form actor–verb–object, stored in a learning record store. Its purpose is to capture learning that happens outside a course — on the job, in a simulation, in an app — not only course completions.
Earlier learning standards assumed learning happened inside a course inside a learning management system, and recorded a narrow set of outcomes: launched, completed, scored. xAPI removes that assumption.
Every observation is a statement with three required parts: an actor (who), a verb (what they did), and an object (what they did it to). "Priya completed Module 4" and "Priya passed the forklift assessment" are the same shape of record. Statements can carry result and context data, so a score, a duration, or the activity a record belongs to travel with it.
Statements are written to a learning record store, a system whose responsibility is to accept, store, and serve them. Because the vocabulary is extensible, an organization can define verbs and activity types for its own domain — which is the specification's strength and its main practical difficulty, since two systems may describe the same event differently unless a shared profile is agreed.
Most workforce learning is not a course. It is coaching, practice, shadowing, and on-the-job application, and a completion-only record cannot represent any of it. xAPI gives that activity a common shape so it can be reported alongside formal training.
The privacy consequence deserves attention. A statement stream is behavioural data about identified individuals, so it falls squarely within personal data handling — collection scope, retention period, and access control are design decisions rather than afterthoughts.
QueryTek documents xAPI as learning telemetry literacy, including the data protection questions a statement stream raises. Which telemetry standards a product supports is stated in that product's documentation; QueryTek EBM, the education benefits product, is in active development and not generally available.
