What is Caliper Analytics® v1.1?
The Caliper Analytics standard provides a structured approach to describing, collecting and exchanging learning activity data. Caliper also defines an application programming interface—the Sensor API™—for transforming and exchanging event data from different applications to specific target endpoints for storage, analysis, and use.
How does Caliper benefit teaching and learning?
Cloud computing and machine learning are changing both the learning technology landscape and the business of education. The definition of what constitutes learning is also evolving beyond the formal classroom experience to include informal, social and experiential modes of acquiring knowledge and skills. Caliper is a response to these changes and is animated by the following goals:
- Promote data interoperability by establishing a shared vocabulary for describing learning interactions and a common data interchange format for exchanging learning data between learning platforms, services, and apps
- Support teaching and learning at scale with semantically-rich, semi-structured data streams
- Inform learning analytics research and encourage data-informed decision making
- Enable the development of new and innovative services designed to measure, infer, predict, report and visualize
What is the typical process flow?
Caliper defines an application programming interface (the Sensor API) for learning data producers to marshal and transmit data to a target endpoint. Adopting one or more metric profiles ensures adherence to the information model; implementing the Sensor provides instrumented platforms, applications and services with a transport interface for communicating with data consumers. Caliper consumers must be capable of receiving Caliper messages sent over HTTP. Connections must be secured with Transport Layer Security (TLS) with a valid TLS certificate provided.
Does Caliper 1.1 update or replace any existing specs?
Yes. Caliper 1.1 supersedes Caliper 1.0. This release of the Caliper Analytics standard focuses on the following enhancements:
- Extends as well as refines the Caliper information model with new profiles, events, entities, and actions
- Further clarifies how to express Caliper events and entities in a JSON-LD document
- More fully describes sensor (producer) and endpoint (consumer) behaviors
- Introduces a new certification service for 1EdTech members and provides JSON schema for Event validation
What additional information about Caliper is important?
1EdTech offers its member organizations a certification service for testing applications that emit Caliper messages over HTTP. Each Metric Profile defined in the Caliper Analytics specification serves as a unit of certification. Edtech suppliers may certify their products for one, some, or all relevant Metric Profiles. See the 1EdTech Certified Product Directory for the most up-to-date list of all products that have achieved 1EdTech conformance certification for Caliper.
Note that the Caliper certification service does not currently validate Caliper consuming endpoints. It is anticipated that endpoint certification will be defined in a future release of the Caliper Analytics specification. Also, note that 1EdTech is interested in specifying the use of other transport protocols for exchanging Caliper data. Organizations wishing to work with 1EdTech to add other transport protocols to the Caliper specification should contact the Caliper Working Group directly or indicate interest via the public forum.
