Introducing the Articulate Online API
Some observant customers have noticed that with the December 22, 2008 update of Articulate Online, we added some key functionality to the product:
- Added Articulate Online API functionality
What’s an API and what can it do for me?
In its simplest terms, an API, or Application Programming Interface, is technology that allows one application to communicate with another. Leveraging an API can simplify your business methods, automate data transfer, and more.
For example, do you sell the Articulate-powered training or quiz content you create? Do you use Articulate Online to deliver your training to your clients, but you’re tired of manually creating new users who purchase training via your e-commerce site?
If this scenario sounds familiar, then the new Articulate Online API is for you.
Likewise, maybe your organization uses Articulate Online to manage internal employee training in the enterprise, and you’re looking for a way to automate the communications between your Articulate Online account and your ERP.
For all you programmers, here’s a more technical description from the Articulate Online API documentation:
The Articulate Online API can be used to integrate your own web applications with Articulate Online. The Articulate Online API is a SOAP/XML web service based API that can be called from .NET, PHP, Java, or your platform of choice.
And you can review sample code for automating login here.
What are common uses for the Articulate Online API?
Although the sky’s the limit in terms of your creativity in leveraging the API, here are some common uses for the Articulate Online API:
- Integration of user data with 3rd-party applications such as front-end e-commerce systems
- Enhanced automation of user and group creation and management
- Ability to automate content permissions
- Passing login information to the application (for automated login)
As Dave notes in this forum post, one of our customers has already successfully integrated an e-commerce site with Articulate Online using the API.
How can I get the Articulate Online API?
The Articulate Online API is available now. There is an additional fee to activate API support in your account, and you can contact your sales representative to learn more. As of November 2014, the API is now included with all Articulate Online plans.
36 responses to “Introducing the Articulate Online API”
Hi, great news. Will Articulate be providing any “off the shelf” API solutions or do we need to go to third-party providers for these to code?
Hi Andrew- Yes, you’d need to work with your own developers or third-party providers to leverage the API. Trigent is a company that’s already worked with one of our customers to integrate e-commerce with Articulate Online.
We have client interested in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese online learning.
How is the Articulate Studio and Online system handling the international language issue.
Please advise.
Hi Alex- Our products support all languages. Studio ’09 even includes 11 language packs to customize your player templates. You can learn more here.
[…] been a few months since we first announced the Articulate Online API, and we’ve already begun to see some examples of what’s possible with the […]
I love the idea of a self registration. Here is one thing that I don’t see, and I am curious about the possibilities. Can the self registration process also allow the user to select the group in which they belong?
Hi Eric – yeah, that is certainly possible with the API. On my blog (www.mozealous.com) I give an example of how to do self registration. It wouldn’t be super difficult to add the ability to chose a group as well.
Is there a way to do single sign on?
Hi Beverley- Take a look at item #2 on this page about creating a self-registration page. Is that what you’re looking for?
It’s somewhere in these solutions I’m sure!
Is there a way to change the Articulate Online user interface to different languages? I have learners in several different countries and would like to make their learning experience as easy as possible.
Hi Rachel- that’s currently not possible, but depending on your requirements, you could essentially create your own website — in whatever languages you needed — to launch the content via your Articulate Online account.
Well, with the API it would be possible to re-create most of the Articulate Online UI to support different languages, but not explicitly change the text strings or anything like that.
The only part you couldn’t recreate of the UI in the API is the reporting section.
That being said, we are looking into the possibility of making the Articulate Online user interface support localization in a future update to Articulate Online.
The AO is a step in the right direction.
However: It would be even better if I could implement the backend-API myself, so that I would not have to have my data on Articulate’s site, and pay fees for using the API.
The API url should be a pr project configurable variable.
The different API calls could also be configurable.
The XML used to read/write data should be an open specification.
Thanks for the feedback, James. I’d encourage you to share all feedback via our feature request form.
The API is included free of charge with all Premium level Articulate Online plans and higher. For other plans, there is a one-time activation fee (the price depends on whether you subscribe monthly or annually).
I’d like to know if I can use the API to import data into our Saba LMS system. What is the best way to create that data feed? Does Articulate-Online offer consulting/design service to help set this up?
Hi Gabriel- what data are you looking to import into Saba?
We do not offer consulting services, but here’s a blog entry on a customer who does.
I would need to import or feed the following fields to my Saba LMS:
– Saba/Student Username
– Course ID
– Course version
– Course completion date
– Course score
If Articulate-Online allows you to create the student username, then we could use the same name to match the data. I could also use the same Course ID if Articulate allowed for an ID field in addition to the Course Name.
Can you create any custom fields for this purpose in Articulate-Online? I’d like to use Articulate-Online, but we need to keep all employee training records housed within our validated LMS to comply with FDA regulations.
A really useful step to integrate an e-learning platform with our e-comerce site.
Is it possible to access Student data from my LMS, such as Student Name, email address, course ID, course name, score, etc.? I need to build a Flash component that uses this information.
Hi Bob,
Currently the Articulate Online API doesn’t allow you to access any of the reporting data (score/status). The API can however be very useful in user management (automating adding/removing users, deleting courses, etc).
-Dave
How about Sharepoint integration? Could user results and reports be exported from Articulate Online to Sharepoint via the API?
Hi Andre- As Dave noted above, the Articulate Online API does not currently give you access to any reporting data, so you would not be able to extract that to SharePoint. You can do a number of other things with the API, though
Hi,
Is there any storage or bandwidth limitation in the Articulate Online account? A lot of the content in our customers courses is video. Will it work?
Hi Devendra- you’re limited to hosting the number of content items that your plan allows (compare plans – we also offer separate content packs if you need to host and deliver additional content items). There’s a 500 MB limit per content item that you upload, which is really big, even if you have a lot of video.
As long as your bandwidth usage is reasonable, you shouldn’t run into any issues, though we do have the following text in the Articulate Online Terms of Service:
“If your bandwidth usage significantly exceeds the average bandwidth usage (as determined solely by Articulate) of other Articulate Online customers, we reserve the right to immediately disable your account or throttle your account until you can reduce your bandwidth consumption.”
Most customers will never have to worry about this, though – even with a lot of video. That statement is primarily there to prevent abuse of the service.
[…] just over a year ago, the Articulate Online API is a great way to extend the capabilities of your elearning delivery and tracking solution. The API […]
I have two questions.
I have a community site where people login to access the community. I want to present logged in people with access to specific learning modules and then give them badges upon completing specific learning modules.
1) If my user is logged into my application can I just provide them with a link that will take them directly into a learning module without requiring them to login to AO? If I can using the API, can I also pass a unique identifier to AO so I can track results (see next question)?
2) I see from older posts that the AO API does not allow you to share module results with a third party database. Has this changed? Is it now possible? Can I get results into my database using the unique identifier I passed to AO (see question 1).
Thank you.
@David: #1 should be possible via single sign-on, but #2 is not yet possible (cannot extract reporting data via the API).
Is there a way to achieve my desired objective you any of articulates other software packages?
Thanks! I was wondering if there were any updates to the API yet.
@David: There is not. Articulate Online is your best bet.
The result of trainees taking my course are VITAL and I will need to be able to access those results in an automated way. Can you offer me any hope that your otherwise exceptional platform here will eventually offer it. Kind of a waste to have all this stuff and not that (relatively simple) feature.
@Marco: Thanks for the feedback. Though I can’t promise that we’ll implement automated reporting in Articulate Online in the future, I can say that it’s a very popular request and that we’re always working to make our products better. The best way to add your voice for that feature and any others you’d like to see is by submitting a feature request here.
Our company has purchased Articulate on line. We did user management and Group management through web Api. But we are not able to do reporting like score by group or score by individual user by using api.
Can anybody tell me any web method Present in api for reporting?
I am .net developer.
@sandeep: Thanks for asking, but it’s not possible to extract reporting / scoring data via the API.
Do you plan to provide the reporting data via API in future at all?
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