Tuesday 18 June 2013

Tin Can API

Tin Can API is a specification for collecting information about learning experiences and seems to be emerging as fashionable and more mature technology.


Tin Can is "a brand new specification for learning technology that makes it possible to collect data about the wide range of experiences a person has (online and offline). This API captures data in a consistent format about a person or group’s activities from many technologies. Very different systems are able to securely communicate by capturing and sharing this stream of activities using Tin Can’s simple vocabulary."

Whether this system will have an effect in medicine remains to be seen. There are a number of registration / CPD / learning portfolio systems already available to health care professionals including my College's (Royal College of Physicians) CPD diary and BMJ Learning Portfolio. For larger learning experiences we will always have the request of "can you put that in a PDF for my portfolio?" but for smaller experiences perhaps an industry-standard API might be the way to make our collections a little more compatible with each other.

Tin Can API is certainly worth investigating.

No comments:

Post a Comment