Juan:

I have found that flexibility is increasingly becoming significant for today's digital learners, so in considering your e-platform integration, the amount of flexibility it affords for learners and teachers to teach and learn anywhere at anytime is a critical factor for adoption. The following link gives some trends and issues to consider in flexible learning environments that may be of some help to your question:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291523527_Flexible_Learning_Environments-Theories-Trends-Issues

Many thanks,

Debra

Data Flexible Learning Environments-Theories-Trends-Issues

Juan,

You may find some technical answers to your question in the various specifications developed by the IMS Global Learning Consortium

http://www.imsglobal.org/specifications.html

Hi Juan,

Indeed, xAPI (ex TinCan) is emerging to be a de-facto standard for interaction tracking in learning environments. It the React Group of EPFL, we use it for tracking user (students and teachers) activities in the Graasp platform, and it works well. For more details, please see below our publication regarding Knowledge Discovery mentioning how activity tracking is done. Also, I have given a workshop at the Learning Analytics Summer Institute that could be relevant. It explains how to build Interactive Learning Dashboards on top of xAPI statement streams: http://www.slideshare.net/vozniuk/interactive-learning-analytics-dashboards-with-elk-elasticsearch-logstash-kibana-lasi-2016-andrii-vozniuk-maria-rodrigueztriana-denis-gillet

However, if you would like to consider some alternatives to xAPI, you may want to take a look at ActivityStreams and IMS Caliper as alternative formats. On a high-level, all these three formats record user-platform interactions in the form of the actor-verb-object triplet capturing who did what with what on the platform. However, on a more detailed level, each format captures additional aspects of the interaction.

Not depending which format you choose in the end, having a common cross-platform set of verbs with a well-defined meaning is critical for being able to benefit from user interactions captured by several platforms. Below, I attach several papers that contain the discussion about the formats used and present implementation of tracking with these formats.

Best,

Andrii

http://www.slideshare.net/vozniuk/interactive-learning-analytics-dashboards-with-elk-elasticsearch-logstash-kibana-lasi-2016-andrii-vozniuk-maria-rodrigueztriana-denis-gillet

Conference Paper Towards Portable Learning Analytics Dashboards

Article An Overview of Usage Data Formats for Recommendations in TEL

Conference Paper Learning analytics beyond the LMS

Article Tracking Data in Open Learning Environments

Conference Paper Combining Content Analytics and Activity Tracking to Identif...

Thank you all for your answers, they helped me a lot.

Debra:

Gerat presentation! Very helpful for getting up to date on e-learning trends.

Jon:

You are right, there is a lot of interesting technical stuff in IMS Interoperability Standards. Will give it a deeper look.

Andrii:

It's nice to hear about ActivityStreams and Caliper. You take a very interesting approach applying the power of ELK stack to Learning Analytics.

Thanks again. Best Regards,

Juan Carlos