Hi
The following link here shows updates from 2013. Is xAPI that outdated?
Best regards, Jürg
Hi Juerg,
Great question! That page actually needs to be updated; there was a 1.0.2 version released in October 2014 and there's a lot of work currently going into the 1.0.3 version that will be released this year. These are just patch versions to make the specification document easier to read; the actual behaviours required by the LRS and activity providers have not changed since April 2013 and we don't expect them to change any time soon.
This may seem like a long time in technology terms, and certainly it's long enough to expect that learning technologies vendors should have adopted SCORM's successor by now. In standards terms though, it's not unusual for a specification to remain unchanged for a number of years. HTML4, released in 1997 (with the last update in 2001) was only replaced by HTML5 in 2014, having been originally published as a working draft in 2008. The latest USB specification (3.1) was published in 2013, following USB 3.0 which released in 2008.
It's important for standards not to update too frequently as it takes time for the industry to adopt. USB 3.0 products, for example, didn't become available to buy until 2010 - two years after the specification was published.
Too many updates to a specification would lead to a situation where many products are using different versions and the interoperability benefits of having a common standard are lost. There can also be a disincentive for vendors to adopt a constantly changing standard as they have to keep investing effort to stay up to date. That's why we don't intend to release any functional changes to xAPI any time soon.
I hope that helps. Let me know if you have any follow up questions on this.
Andrew