DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Introduction
If you are new to xPress API development, this Developers Guide – which is focussed on xPress Roster – is a very good place to start. It lays out all the pieces you need to get started, and also talks through some practical examples where meaningful data exchanges happen without much effort.
An xPress API implementation requires three components:
Component 1: Authentication – proof that an interface is allowed to interface
Component 2: Infrastructure – setup to exchange information with approved interface
Component 3: Data – actual information exchanged between approved interfaces
We will walk through each of these areas in detail to foster understanding, implementation, integration and a technical foundation for addressing future education needs.
We will also peer into the future at enhancements that can make this baseline setup even more useful.
The Access 4 Learning (A4L) Community’s unique make-up of educators, vendors, and information technology professionals are building APIs enabling access to the data and impacting learning through real world products, services, integrations, and solutions.
So, why is a roster important?
At the simplest level, a roster is a list of students/learners in a program, class/section, or organization: a school, district, or regional entity. In an educational software application, a roster is used to connect a student or learner with the related educator or teacher.
Rosters are important because any kind of instructional application or administrative application that supports the teacher in the classroom requires a link between the students in a class/section and the teacher. That link is sometimes obvious and implicit in the relationship of the teacher to the section, but at other times with software programs, or project-based learning, more explicit relationships need to be created between the students and the teacher. This roster of students is required by all software applications that support students and gives the teacher the ability to manage, coach, and teach the students.
This makes the roster in education one of the fundamental building blocks of any instructional, curricular, assessment, or administrative application.
DOWNLOAD the xPress Technical Handbook (Developer’s Guide – PDF)