What's all this talk about APIs?

These application programming interfaces (APIs) are all the rage these days.  We hear about them in online commerce, social media, and now they are flooding the world of education and online learning.  So what are they exactly?

An API is a way for websites, programmers, and applications to communicate with each other, exchanging information.  If I have a database with information that I would like to disseminate then I can develop an API and make that accessible to the world.  External developers can then create APIs with the purpose of communicating with my API, and thus extract the information that I am making public.  It's similar to the notion of "my people will contact your people and we'll make this happen".  Only the people in mention is actually a software-to-software exchange.

Why APIs are important

APIs are a way to access information or databases which would otherwise be inaccessible.  For example, my database might be protected by a firewall, whereas an API will allow the protected information to be released under certain conditions.  Another example include a commerce situation where sensitive credit card or banking information is involved.  In the context of education, student data is protected through federal and state policies, such as FERPA or HIPPA.

Many organizations use APIs to communicate internally, such as Yahoo and Google, which use APIs as a way to transfer data and information from one department to another.  Many times APIs are used in a vendor-client relationship.  Social media today is driven by APIs, as they allow people to pin interesting web images onto pinterest, share instagram photos on facebook, or share YouTube videos on various platforms.  The social media ecosystem is driven largely by the sharing of information which APIs provide.

API timeline

The presence of APIs spans decades, but it really wasn't until the year 2000 when salesforce.com introduced its first API on an enterprise level as a way for customers to access business applications.  Months later ebay.com released its API as a way to standardize the integration process of how other software and companies accessed the site.  

A year and a half later (2002), Amazon.com joined the ranks as a way to provide access to product data and web services.  A few years later, many of the key players in social media began developing APIs.  Flickr developed their API in 2005, and then Facebook and Twitter responded with their own APIs in 2006.  Another pivotal advancement in 2006 was Google's launch of the Google Maps API.  The Google Maps API created a medium for integrating data with geographical location and is now a standard feature across the web, eventually building up to the release of foursquare.  

source: www.cloudave.com

APIs today

There has been a tremendous amount of innovation and development among the API community in the past decade.  Developers are continually refining their processes and creating powerful and effective APIs.  Many organizations hold contests (even hackathons) in order to help spur API innovation and ideas.  

There are many educational possibilities that are available to use through the advent and implementation of APIs.  Instructure is among the LMS leaders in creating and distributing accessible APIs to internal/external developers and third party software.  This allows instructional designers and faculty to publish course content and have that content communicate with the LMS (whether integrating with the LMS gradebook, utilizing LTI resources, or leveraging SCORM content).  

source: www.hackeducation.com

The presence of APIs in education will help academic institutions to ensure compliance, create accessible content for students and faculty, increase efficiency, interoperability, and integration with various academic platforms, leverage the use of mobile technology within the classroom, provide robust student (and faculty) analytics, increase the use of rich feature sets, help to manage the security of user data, introduce gamification, and so much more.