Forum LAMS Lounge Forum: What will happen to LAMS when new vesion of Moodle is released?

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Trevor,

This seems to be a common misconception about Moodle2 (and LAMS, I guess).

Moodle 2 will do things like conditioning but it doesn't quite do sequencing, branching, outputs, optionals, authoring and monitor, force completes, Groupings, stop points, interoperability, export portfolio, etc, that LAMS does.

Moodle 2 has the condition features that LAMS had back in 2002... and I mean this in the nicest possible way

People that state that Moodle2 is leaving LAMS obsolete, most likely haven't look at LAMS since 2002 because it does a whole lot more than just "show/hide this if the user get X or Y" conditioning.

As a matter of fact, we have had Moodle tools integrated within LAMS for almost half a year already. And these Moodle activities implement a lot more than just completion, so you can say for instance, if the user posted X number of words in the Moodle Forum, then send him to do this set of activities, or stop him and don't allow him to continue, or make them go back and do more, etc, etc. Also, you can use the nice drag and drop author and monitor to create very complex and elaborate learning sequences. Additionally, you can export them and share them with other people (yes, even if they are moodle activities!).

And the changes to do this for Moodle activities are not only very few, but they make them a lot more powerful than what Moodle 2 now does. But that's because they leverage on LAMS progress/sequencing engine.

By far, you gain a lot more by doing a LAMS Moodle integration than just with Moodle2 conditioning.

In short: yes, you are right... LAMS and Moodle can complement each other very very well.

What we try to do in LAMS is not copy Moodle (or any LMS), but provide it with all the good stuff that LAMS does. Therefore all the integrations we have and the new deeper integrations.

We want to keep focusing in what we do best: orchestrate learning activities that allow the teacher to teach better and the students to learn from eachother. And by no means, create -yet another, course management system... Moodle, Sakai, .LRN are already pretty good at it.

I hope that helps and clarify things a bit

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: James Dalziel

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As Ernie has mentioned, there are lots of LAMS features related to sequencing that go beyond conditional activities, so even with the new features coming in Moodle 2, we think there are lots of benefits from using Moodle and LAMS together when you want a structured sequence of activities - or to put it in educational terms - when scaffolding of activities for student learning is important to achieving the desired educational outcomes. The visual nature of LAMS Authoring also has special benefits for teachers.

The LAMS team will continue to focus on our particular area of expertise around activity sequencing, rather than trying to add traditional LMS functionality to LAMS that already exists in many other systems. We'll continue to work on integrating LAMS with key LMSs including Moodle, and our new work on "deep tools integration" is an important next step for this work.

Related to this, Martin Dougiamas (leader of Moodle) and I catch up from time to time to share ideas about the future of e-learning, and we've always had alot of respect for each other's work. When we last spoke a few months ago, one of the main things we said we'd look at next was the requirements for deep tools integration as mentioned above, and Martin was keen to hear about our technical experience of doing this with Moodle to see what extensions might be needed to the APIs for Moodle tools. If this worked out well, Martin was interested to build these extensions into future Moodle releases in a way that would work not just for LAMS, but also for other similar sequencing approaches - so this would be good for Moodle/LAMS integration, but also good for integration with other sequencing systems.

For me, one of the most important next steps for LAMS is the Activity Planner, and in particular, developing libraries of good teaching ideas which can be easily used and adapted by educators. This is a quite new dimension to LAMS that is more educational than technical in focus, and we hope will break new ground for e-learning. For more information on the Planner, see
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/planner/

Posted by James Dalziel