#LSCon: The Missing Link - Data Interoperability From Learning Systems to Operations

Copyright © 2016 Float. All rights reserved.www.gowtihﬂoat.com
The Missing Link
Data Interoperability from Learning Systems to Operations
Chad Udell@gowithﬂoat

About Chad Udell
Managing Director at Float
Faculty for over 10 years at Bradley University in Interactive Media
Been designing and developing web and learning solutions for nearly 20 years
A bit of a hacker/tinkerer, and a learning technology and design geek
chadu@gowithﬂoat.com - @visualrinse on Twitter
Author of Learning Everywhere: How Mobile Content Strategies are Transforming Training,
Editor and Author of Mastering Mobile Learning: Tips and Techniques for Success

Today’s Topics
• Getting Over the Buzzword Bingo Effect
• Understanding the Problem
• Envisioning a Solution
• Embarking on the Path to ???
• Your To-Dos (Yes, Sorry, You’re Getting
Assignments from This)
• Q&A / Discussion
Morgueﬁle: cohdra

Copyright © 2016 Float. All rights reserved.www.gowithﬂoat.com
Attention:
Buzzword Alert
SOA

Cloud

SaaS

PaaS

IaaS

Big Data

Machine Learning

Predictive Analytics
Flickr: mconnors

Does this look like your infrastructure?
• How do you correlate learning
material usage and assessment
with actual performance?

• How do you provide and receive
more value to and from your
enterprise business partners?
The Silo Problem
Morgueﬁle: diannehope

Why is this a problem?
• Interoperability - SCORM and
XAPI are just a start (a slightly
bigger silo)

• Focus on the wrong things

• Joining the rest of the enterprise
ecosystem is necessary to
prevent our extinction
Three main things…
ﬂickr: frankieleon

This isn’t a
joke…
This is a clarion call.
• It’s time to make your data open,
available to your enterprise.

• It’s time to request openness of your
company’s data as well.

• This can be done much easier than in
the past.

• No direct access to databases is
needed.

• It can be secure.

Does this sound familiar?
“Our employees are surrounded by exciting technologies every day: amazing
consumer technology, cool public apps, and a huge array of digital distractions
in their daily lives. My team is in a race to bring those same ideas into our
internal learning. Our employees are all in a hurry to learn and to improve
themselves. If we’re not racing alongside, staying useful and relevant, we’ll be
left behind. The entire learning function might become irrelevant.”

- Geoﬀ Stead, then, Qualcomm Mobile Learning Director,
now Director of Digital & New Products
Cambridge English Language Assessment

How do we
ﬁx this?
There is no magic bullet. wand. trick.
• Learn from the larger enterprise

• Partner with the business to open doors

• Request transparency from our vendors

• Train up and get smart

• Hire for the future
Flickr: Eva Peris

Enterprise has
moved on.
Even proprietary systems are
open.
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

• SaaS, PaaS and now IaaS

• Application Programming Interfaces (API) are
a way of life

• Eighty percent of the Fortune 500 are on the
Microsoft Cloud

• 60 percent of Fortune 500 enterprises are
using at least one Google cloud service
Morgueﬁle: pippalou

What’s an API?
Application Programming
Interfaces are widespread, but
not in learning…
• An easy way to get data into and out of a system

• A abstracted interface to separate content from
business logic and/or presentation

• Thousands of APIs exist - Programmable Web tracks
over 14,000 of them!

• Only 680 of them are listed as Education

• Only 55 listed as LMS (most of those aren’t even
correctly labelled)

• Only 25 are categorized as LMS
Morgueﬁle: mconnors

But what
about…
Yeah, I know what you are
going to say.
• XAPI

• SCORM
Morgueﬁle: clarita

SOA for Learning and Enterprise
What freedom looks like!

What I’m proposing…

SalesForce.com Contact/Lead

SalesForce.com Opportunity

SCORM Manifest - Sales Training

XAPI - Training Event (Results)

Account ID
ID
Industry
Title
Object
Activity

We seek to enable workﬂows.
1. Return a list of all salespersons that have not sold any q1 2016 products and have
scored less than 80% on the product knowledge course that was updated in q4 2015

2. Warn a manager when scheduling any hourly city maintenance employees that haven't
taken the personal protection equipment course

3. Bring back a list of any employee that has ﬁled a workspace comfort complaint that
hasn't taken the ergonomics recommendations course

4. Email any employee that currently has more than 3 years of work history and hasn't
enrolled in the mentorship program as a mentor

5. Enroll and require the "company cares" workshop for any employee that has logged
less than 3% of their time to community service projects in the last year.

6. Email an employee with a link to the Supply Chain basics course if they enter "dirty
data" into a work order web app more than 5 times in one work month.

7. Notify a team manager with a list of service techs that take more than 15% longer than
they are supposed to on scheduled maintenance tasks at client sites, recommend a
one-on-one conversation with them to discuss potential issues

What we’re seeking
• A tool to aid/enable machine
learning for learning

• A common ground to loosely
couple business to learning

• A piece of traction to stop the
slide to irrelevance

What this unlocks.
• Business Intelligence

• Data Science

• Predictive Analytics

• Machine Learning
Morgueﬁle: clarita

Your tasks
• Concept the dicier use cases
your business stumbles on

• Talk to your business partners to
ﬁnd out what APIs they can
provide to you

• Ask them what data you could
provide to them to help out

• Contact your LMS vendor and
become familiar with their APIs

• Keep in touch with me
Morgueﬁle: caprisco

References
API and Data Normalizations: http://www.slideshare.net/CloudElements/api-data-normalization-and-
interactions-v31
Business Intelligence Spending: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2613339/business-intelligence/gartner--bi-
software-spending-to-hit--17-1-billion-by-2016--but-pace-of-growth.html
Opening Legacy Data Silos: Using Experience Data for Educational Impact:
http://adlnet.gov/adl-assets/uploads/2015/12/Paper_Opening_Legacy_Data_Silos_-
Using_Experience_Data_for_Educational_Impact_Poltrack_Creighton.pdf
Adapting LMS Architecture to the SOA: An Architectural Approach:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5072539&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org
%2Fiel5%2F5072479%2F5072480%2F05072539.pdf%3Farnumber%3D5072539
A Service Oriented Architecture to Integrate Mobile Assessment in Learning Management Systems:
http://www.academia.edu/169288/
A_Service_Oriented_Architecture_to_Integrate_Mobile_Assessment_in_Learning_Management_Systems

Get a Free
Chapter
New from ASTD Press and Wiley
ﬂoat.ly/mml-book

Also
Available!
http://
www.amazon.com/

chadu@gowithﬂoat.com

@gowithﬂoat
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#LSCon: The Missing Link - Data Interoperability From Learning Systems to Operations

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