Recommended Deployment Patterns & "Golden Path"

When developing a product with Learnosity Build, you should start with our recommended APIs. We've designated the "Golden Path", a set of high-level APIs that we recommend, to integrate Learnosity with minimum configuration. Each API in this set is patched and updated regularly, integrates smoothly with other recommended APIs, and when used together, reduce the developer's workload in creating a successful product or proof of concept.

The recommended APIs as we have defined them, are as follows: 

To learn about in-depth examples of deployments with Learnosity Build APIs, see our technical solutions pages.

Benefits of using the Learnosity Golden Path

With the Golden Path Without

Best authoring experience (Author API or Author Site)

You get the famously full-featured Learnosity authoring experience. 

 You would need to integrate many components and do more development work than you would on the golden path.

Seamless Item bank integration (Items API)

Store all your education content in Learnosity's powerful Item banks. Easily organize, manage, and retrieve exactly what you need from the Item bank for assessments or for authoring Activities.

 You would need to manage the integration of storage and retrieval for content within your own platform.

Assessment Player (Items API)

You get the powerful built-in assessment player to easily control sequencing and flow of your assessments.

 You would need to build your own UI and call methods for each UI element to replicate some or all of that functionality. 

End-to-end integration (Learnosity JSON format)

Create, store, and access all your education content in one format based on JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). No need to write parsers, converters, or other system integration tools.

 You would have to build or integrate parsers, converters, or other system integration tools, as well as additional data management on your server side.

Powerful Data Access (Data API) 

Take advantage of Learnosity's powerful data management capability. Go in and add or extract data from your database to display it, or mutate content. You could script Data API to populate a large amount of Question content. You can use Data API to extract class results and display them, perform backoffice database operations management and data extraction. 

 You would need to develop some or all of that functionality from scratch.

Lower Level APIs

Lower-level libraries are not recommended for most projects, and may not be available on all plans. 

Other APIs and sites listed as part of our products are the core parts of our toolkit, providing the best, most complete authoring, assessment, and analytics experience possible.

Learnosity does have certain lower level APIs, which are used as part of Author API, Items API and Reports API, providing less functionality. Historically, some clients have used these to build their application, in cases where our top level APIs were not available yet. 

We do not advise using these APIs for any new engagements going forward, without discussion with Learnosity Support.

Reference material for these APIs can be found in our Developer Documentation section - under the Lower Level APIs section at the base of that page.

Understanding API relationships

Learnosity Build APIs are JavaScript libraries embedded on your page. Some APIs can load other APIs automatically based on the nature of the product or your specified initialization options. 

You will only need to load the top level Golden Path APIs to access the features of the lower level APIs. Some top level APIs provide methods to access the lower level APIs they load. For example, Items API has an assessApp() method and a questionsApp() method which can be used to the app instance created by Items API.

Learnosity Assessments

  • Items API (top level): delivers assessments.
    • Assess API (lower level, loaded by Items API): renders the standard assessment player.
      • Questions API (lower level, loaded by Assess API): renders each Question.
  • Items API (top level): delivers assessments.
    • Questions API (lower level, loaded by Items API): renders Questions inline with other page content, without the assessment player.
  • Items API (top level): delivers assessments.
    • Annotations API (lower level, loaded by Items API): lets learners annotate content in the assessment player.
    • Assess API (lower level, loaded by Items API): renders the standard assessment player.
      • Questions API (lower level, loaded by Assess API): renders each Question.

Learnosity Authoring

  • Author API (top level): creates and manages Items and Questions.
    • Question Editor API (lower level, loaded by Author API): renders the editor for authoring Questions.
      • Questions API (lower level, loaded by Question Editor API): renders each Question.
  • Author API (top level): creates and manages Items and Questions.
    • Items API (top level, loaded by Author API): previews Activities using the assessment player.
      • Assess API (lower level, loaded by Items API): renders the assessment player.
        • Questions API (lower level, loaded by Assess API): renders each Question.
  • Author API (top level): creates and manages Items and Questions.
    • Author Aide API (premium, loaded by Author API): AI-assisted authoring, available with Author Aide access.

Learnosity Analytics

  • Reports API (top level): shows learner results.
    • Items API (top level, loaded by Reports API): shows reports against Items and Questions.
  • Reports API (top level): shows learner results.
    • Events API (premium, loaded by Reports API): powers the Live Progress report, a real-time dashboard for proctors.
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