Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: SAKAI GUEST THREAD: Is a flowchart the right metaphor?

The benefits of visualising the teaching and learning process through LAMS authoring have come up again and again in trials and evaluations. For some educators, LAMS helps to make explicit and conscious a process that is often just below consciousness - the process of planning educational activities (if you've never formally studied teaching and learning, ie, most university faculty, you tend to teach based on past experiences and gut feel - hence the sense of educational planning as being just below consciousness).

For others, just seeing the flow of activities is easier to work with than lots of clumps of text (whether this text relates to content or collaborative activities). Based on my experience of talking to users, of all the features that attracts people to LAMS, the authoring environment would be near the top, if not the top.

That said, I agree that a flowchart approach isn't for everyone. One reason for this is that even though it doesn't in any way ensure good pedagogy, the very nature of the LAMS authoring environment tends to lead faculty to consider a more activity-centric approach to their teaching. In some contexts this is not the best way to teach a topic, but in other contexts, I suspect that some faculty find this challenging because it may draw attention to the pedagogical limitations of their current teaching methods ("if all I do is lecture and then give essays/exams, then what are all the other tools down the side of the authoring window for?").

A different reason is that some faculty are looking for something even quicker and simpler than the current LAMS authoring environment. Ideally they'd like to go to a single page, where most of the sequence structure and settings have been pre-set, and all they have to do is fill in the discipline-based content - eg, upload/link to the case study to read, type in the discussion thread topics, type in the assessment requirements - then hit save and run. If faculty are happy to use a pre-built template of this kind, then the task of creating and running a sequence can take no more than a few minutes.

This second idea relates to the concept of a "pedagogic planner" and our work on "Author Xpress". For details about this topic (including links to sample screenshots), see the questions and reply at
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/educationalcommunity/lamsresearchdevelopment/forums/message-view?message%5fid=237168

This is another area where the workflow/LD/LAMS approach has much to offer that is quite new and different to traditional LMS use.

Posted by James Dalziel

For some educators, LAMS helps to make explicit and conscious a process that is often just below consciousness - the process of planning educational activities (if you've never formally studied teaching and learning, ie, most university faculty, you tend to teach based on past experiences and gut feel - hence the sense of educational planning as being just below consciousness)....I suspect that some faculty find this challenging because it may draw attention to the pedagogical limitations of their current teaching methods ("if all I do is lecture and then give essays/exams, then what are all the other tools down the side of the authoring window for?").

This raises a critical question: What role should the learning environment have in shaping teaching practices? I can imagine several possible answers:

1. No role. The learning environment is a neutral container. (One might call this the empty room hypothesis.)
2. The learning environment should be customizeable to support the teaching practices of individual instructors. (Call this the situated software hypothesis.)
3. The learning environment should help teachers articulate and define their individual teaching practices. (Let's call this the process externalization hypothesis.)
4. There exist objective best teaching practices and those practices should be encoded into the learning evironment. (I'm struggling for a name for this one. Call it the architecture of practice hypothesis for the moment.)

One could imagine applying any of these hypotheses at the tool level or the system level. One could also imagine that the hypotheses (and therefore software) favored by an institution reflect the relationships between the IT and academic sides of the house.

What I hear you saying, James, is that the flowchart metaphor in LAMS embodies the process visualization hypothesis. I'd be curious to hear how members of the Sakai community would characterize their positions on the issue, both as tool developers and as adopting institutions.

Posted by Michael Feldstein