Troy asks:
My organization, has a student information system with, among several features, a grade book. We also host Moodle sites. What we want is teachers to be able to teach and grade in Moodle and have the activity details and scores pushed into the TSIS Gradebook. We\'ve talked about building a \"middle man\" plugin between the two but is xAPI a solution for what we want?
My response:
Hi Troy!
Great question! Following an industry specification like xAPI is definitely the right solution here but let's examine your other option first.
As you mentioned, you could build a middle man application to pull data from Moodle and push it into your SIS. To do so, you'd need to define a data structure and data transfer mechanism for the information to go from Moodle to your SIS and you'd need to customize both products to understand that common data model.
Alternatively, you could follow xAPI's data model and data transfer mechanism. There's still a little work to do to define exactly how you populate the xAPI statements, but you're not starting from scratch. More importantly following a specification allows you to more easily integration Moodle and/or your SIS with other systems in future and to build on existing work to track Moodle events with xAPI.
I hope that's helpful. Do you have any questions about the details?