CMI-5 Moving Forward (cmi5 – sandstone)

The recent April 15-16 on moving the CMI-5 specification ahead, resulted in a finalized draft release of the specification and target dates for initial release!

What the heck is CMI-5?

We talked about it a bit in a previous post, though since then AICC has turned the management of the specification over to the ADL.

adlFrom the ADL page which announced the meeting (which I wasn’t aware of til after the fact!):

xAPI represents a huge advance in learning technology and the industry is racing to embrace it. However, xAPI by itself is too broad for plug-and-play interoperability between off-the-shelf learning tools and systems. CMI-5 fills this gap and provides a model to migrate your current training operation to xAPI. CMI-5 is an “xAPI profile.” CMI-5 will utilize the xAPI as the communication and data layer, combine the features of both the AICC and SCORM specifications, and tap the new benefits of xAPI.

In short, it’s “xAPI with Rules”.

You can think of CMI-5 as the LMS “use case” for xAPI. CMI-5 defines how the LMS and the content will communicate using the xAPI Learning Record Store (LRS). The “extra rules” that CMI-5 provides are needed for true “plug-and-play” interoperability.

As a result of the meeting,  the initial ‘cmi5 Sandstone’ draft release is targeted for early May 2015 with the first full release planned for September 2015.

This initial ‘Sandstone’ is intended for protoyping products and services (i.e. an LMS) that could make use of a specification more structured than xAPI.

A few highlights:

  • ‘CMI-5’ will now be known as ‘cmi5’
  • OAuth will be removed in favor of ‘basic authentication’ (but to be re-added later?)
  • Allow for multiple attempts
  • A “satisfied” verb to record complete/passed will be required
  • The ‘Suspend’ and ‘Resume’ verbs will be removed as unnecessary (given other methods)

Full Meeting Notes available at GitHub (as is the current spec).

Read more at Learning Solutions Mag.

In sum, I’m glad to see this moving ahead. xAPI (TinCan) as it stands could be *too* flexible for an LMS environment (i.e. how are you going to run reports on completion when ANY word can be used to signify completion). A tighter spec for products like Learning Management Systems is a good idea.

In fact, RISC has a excellent article on cmi5 (and SCORM, xAPI, etc) and the various issues cmi5 is intended to address, including a good ‘Sample Rule’.

But ADL needs to get better at organizing their outreach. Visiting their home page barely mentions CMI-5 (ooops, cmi5) except for a notice about the working group that happened in April… Where’s their dedicated ‘about cmi5’ page?
(this may be it [http://www.adlnet.gov/tla/cmi5/] but Chrome says it has a ‘redirect loop 🙁 )

ADL could take a page from Rustici’s book… They mastered the art of promotion exceedingly well…(and even have references to cmi5 on *their* site). There’s still not even a CMI-5 entry in Wikipedia…(any volunteers?)

 

 

3 thoughts on “CMI-5 Moving Forward (cmi5 – sandstone)

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