xAPI specification: Activities of type cmi.interaction - 'performance'

Question

My questions relate to Activities of type cmi.interaction, specifically the 'performance' interaction type, an example of which appears in Appendix C of the xAPI specification here and is reproduced below for convenience:

"definition": {
    "description": {
        "en-US": "This interaction measures performance over a day of RS sports:"
    },
    "type": "http://adlnet.gov/expapi/activities/cmi.interaction",
    "interactionType": "performance",
    "correctResponsesPattern": [
        "pong[.]1:[,]dg[.]:10[,]lunch[.]"
    ],
    "steps": [
        {
            "id": "pong", 
            "description": {
                "en-US": "Net pong matches won"
            }
        },
        {
            "id": "dg", 
            "description": {
                "en-US": "Strokes over par in disc golf at Liberty"
                }
            },
        {
            "id": "lunch", 
            "description": {
                "en-US": "Lunch having been eaten"
            }
        }
    ]
}

I am a bit unclear as to the intention of this interaction type. It does not appear to be a question type but rather a means of measuring the performance of tasks not necessarily related to online learning. My questions:

Is it intended that the participant record their own scores or would this be the responsibility of the moderator?
Regarding the correctResponsesPattern value within the example, does the syntax mean that to satisfy requirements the participant: (i) needs to win at least one Pong game, (ii) score fewer than 10 shots over par at golf, and (iii) eat lunch (without restriction)? Use of the colon symbol (:) does not appear to be explained in the main part of the specification.

Thank you.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 29 '17 at 18:14

From the SCORM RTE (ultimately the source of these):

The interaction requires the learner to perform a task that requires multiple steps

Each of those steps consists of a "name" and an "answer" with one of those required in each segment of the pattern (making the other optional). For much more on the "performance" interaction type you'd reference the "SCORM® 2004 4th Edition Run-Time Environment" RTE-4-69 (page 129). Originally the xAPI interactions were considered a direct reference to the older specification, that language has been softened in the most recent version, the relevant content is:

As a way to allow these practices and structures to extend Experience API's utility, this specification includes built-in definitions for interactions, which borrows from the SCORM 2004 4th Edition Data Model. These definitions are intended to provide a simple and familiar utility for recording interaction data. Since 1.0.3, direct references to the SCORM data model have started to be removed, and any associated requirements included directly in this document.

The interpretation of what information each individual step is capturing will be activity specific. Your interpretation could be correct, another interpretation (and potentially more realistic for e-learning) is that the learner answered 3 questions in that order with those answers.

From an xAPI perspective unless you are specifically attempting to map directly from a SCORM 2004 interaction to simplify mapping in an LMS that already supports such interactions then you are better off capturing this type of information using a different data model, probably where the steps themselves are recorded as separate statements.

xAPI specification: Activities of type cmi.interaction - 'performance'

1 Answers1