Learning records and xAPI

Scaffold can produce xAPI learning records when a learner uses supported content. These records describe learning activity; they do not replace Scaffold’s saved learner state or the official score in the LMS gradebook.

For educators and institutions, this provides richer visibility into the learner journey beyond a final score: moving through content, opening hints, interacting with blocks, submitting answers, and progressing through quizzes.

Recording is observational. If the host does not provide xAPI support, or if delivery fails, the learner can continue and assessment, persistence, feedback, and grading keep their normal authority.

What is recorded

Scaffold currently records these learner-runtime events:

• Sessions and surfaces: a Scaffold activity is initialized and terminated, including session duration; each presented page or slide is experienced.
• Assessment questions: Multiple choice, Multi-select, Dropdown, Fill in the blanks, Sequencing, Matching, Categorise, and Image hotspot record an accepted answer with the response, correctness, normalized score, and attempt number. Revealed hints record an interaction.
• Quizzes: a quiz records attempted, per-question answered, completed, and passed or failed events, including the aggregate score and duration where applicable.
• Learner activities: Checklist records item interactions and completion. Flashcards record card flips, ratings, progress, and deck completion.
• Resources: Resource link records launched. PDF records launched and each page experienced. Audio records attempted when playback starts and completed when playback reaches the end.
• Layouts: Tabs, Accordion, and Paginated layouts record an experienced event for each section the learner opens.
• Visual content: Gallery records displayed images as experienced. Annotated figure records opened annotations as experienced.

This is an explicit catalogue rather than an automatic record of every click. A block not listed here does not currently emit a block-specific learning record.

Where records go

Moodle

The Moodle integration adds the authenticated Moodle user as the xAPI Actor and accepts the statement through Moodle’s core_xapi subsystem. The accepted statement becomes a standard Moodle event owned by the Moodle site.

Open edX

The Open edX integration validates the statement and publishes it to the Open edX tracking pipeline as the scaffold.xapi event.

Scaffold does not operate an external Learning Record Store (LRS), send records to a Scaffold-hosted service, or configure a downstream analytics destination. Any export, event consumer, or LRS connection is the responsibility of the LMS deployment.

Records, learner state, and grades

These are three separate data paths:

• Learner state lets a learner resume answers, attempts, checklist progress, and flashcard progress.
• Official grades are calculated through the server-side assessment flow and published through the LMS grading mechanism.
• Learning records describe supported experiences and interactions for the host event pipeline.

A learning record never decides an official grade. Scaffold records an answer only after the authoritative assessment operation has been accepted.

Identity, privacy, and retention

Core does not collect an xAPI Actor. Moodle adds the authenticated Moodle user as the Actor. Open edX associates the learner through its trusted tracking context and rejects any Actor supplied by the browser. The host integration also owns permitted placement context.

The institution operating Moodle or Open edX controls access, retention, export, and any onward delivery of these events. Review that host’s event and privacy configuration alongside Scaffold’s learner state and grade retention.

Authoring preview does not receive xAPI capability, so an author previewing content does not produce these learner records.

Scaffold xAPI vocabulary

Scaffold-owned activity types and extensions use durable identifiers under https://scaffold.ac/xapi/. The vocabulary pages define those identifiers and their value shapes for event consumers.