Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: Instructions Tab Question

Online and offline instructions are *only* viewable by the tutors in Monitor, so these are specific instructions on how to run or facilitate the activity with the students.

As reusability is one of the main drivers behind LAMS, at times a sequence designer (ie: teacher) might need to give instruction to other people (ie: tutors) that will be using (running) the sequence information about the aim of the activity.

So following your example, say the teacher wants the students to have an offline Chat. In the Offline Instructions for the Chat activity he can give the tutors instructions on how to facilitate the chat... for instance "make sure the topic of the discussion focuses on XYZ".

The online and offline instructions are more important when you are designing a sequence that might need to run in both due to practical restrictions, for example. So if you know that you might need to run a survey but you might need to have the survey with students running offline, then you can append the paper copy of the survey to the Offline instructions and explain the tutor there that she needs to print copies for the students and give them 10 minutes to complete.

Does this make sense?

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

It does make some sense.

It might just be my personal conception of how LAMS is used but it seems that the chance that an individual activity would be used in a sequence both online and offline (thus requiring 2 separate Instruction methods) is quite slim. And from a practical viewpoint, if an activity was used in a sequence as both an online and offline activity, it would require placing 2 activity modules into the sequence (for instance one in each path of a branch) which results in 4 separate places to add instructions (two for each).

It has been my experience (which is admittedly limited) that one very useful type of “Instruction” is not available in LAMS (and thus part of my confusion). That is, the need for “sequence” or “lesson” instructions rather than “activity” instructions”. As you noted, reusability is one of the main drives behind LAMS. Each time I have shared a LAMS lesson with a colleague, I have had to include a separate file along with the zip file that explains the sequence as a whole – pointing out the objectives and the pedagogical concepts behind the lesson. There appears to be no place in LAMS to share this sequence or lesson instruction as it does not apply to any particular activity but rather to the whole sequence.

It might be useful in some future version of LAMS to expand the export feature to include a form (much like the one used to share sequences on the community site) that can be embedded into the exported zip file and somehow exposed upon import.

Neal Hirsig
Tufts University

Posted by Neal Hirsig

Very good point about an instructions page for the whole sequence.

Currently, there's a description page for a sequence in the Properties tab when you save it (see picture). However, those instructions are also displayed to students so you might want to clear it in the Advance tab when you create a lesson.

Tutors are able to see this instructions in Monitor.

At any rate, I have created this task http://bugs.lamsfoundation.org/browse/LDEV-2437 so we address this as well.

Thanks Neal,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

As Ernie mentioned, the main idea behind having both online and offline instructions was to allow for an activity in a sequence to be run either way - so you might have an idea for a sequence that has a discussion at step 3, but you feel this could be run either online or offline depending on the context, so in this case, you could give advice on how to do each type of delivery.

Having said that, it's a rarely used feature, but as it isn't seen by students, it doesn't interfere with them. I keep it in LAMS because it indicates the deeper idea about Learning Designs - that they are not just about e-learning, but often they are a more general pedagogical idea which could be delivered online or offline (or a mixture).

I agree that we need somewhere for "sequence-level" description/advice and that this is not well catered for at the moment, and hopefully we can do something for this in the future as Ernie suggests.

From a different angle, our recent work on the Activity Planner provides a different way of providing advice on a sequence to a teacher - for details, see
wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/planner

Another approach to this was a standardised template of advice to go with sequence that we did some time ago as part of some work by LAMS International - see the doc at
http://lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/files/GlobalWarming_TG.pdf?file%5frev%5fid=278811
which accompanies the sequence
http://lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq_id=278809

Hope this helps!

James

Posted by James Dalziel

I do understand the reasoning behind the 2 instruction sets; however I did find it all a bit confusing. The notion that one would add offline instructions to an online teaching and learning application totally escaped me.

Thanks for the link to the Global Warming lesson and the sequence information form, which I think servers as a great template for some future built-in sequence or lesson instructions.

I noticed that one of the activities in the global warming sequence was having the students collaborate on a PowerPoint presentation. I discovered a way to incorporate this directly into LAMS via Google Docs which has a PowerPoint-like presentation application that can be edited (online) by a group of students. I have a course I use for demo purposes called “Shakespeare’s Birds” and I have created a LAMS activity to demonstrate how this works. It has one activity called Group Presentation which is actually a simple Noticeboard activity with an embedded "iframe" tag.

I created a Google account for the group and set-up the initial pages of a shared presentation. Anyone that accesses the activity can edit the presentation. Once completed (or even in the editing stage) Google provides a read only URL as well; so a Share Resources activity could be placed somewhere later in the sequence to share the presentation with the whole class or a Submit Files activity if it is to be marked and graded.

I have attached the exported LAMS zip file Here . You can import and preview this lesson and try editing it yourself (just follow the directions on the activity page). This can be done with spreadsheets or text documents as well. If the students have their own Google account, there is even no need to create a separate account for the activity. Just a link to the presentation file itself allows anyone (with an account) whom the presentation is shared (for editing purposes) to edit the presentation.

BTW: I attended your excellent presentation at the Sakai Conference in Boston last July. The LAMS Activity Planner is light years ahead of other teaching and learning system concepts. I look forward to working with it.

Neal Hirsig
Tufts University

Posted by Neal Hirsig