Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Tool Adapters: LAMS Integrations taken to the next level!

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi everyone,

After we've done the integrations with different LMS (Moodle, .LRN, Sakai, Blackboard, WebCT, etc), a lot of us were interested to know how difficult it would be to add the LMS tools directly into LAMS and make them behave as if they would be LAMS tool natively.

Well, it seems that we can do this now with not so much work

Over the past month or so, we've been working on Moodle and .LRN Forums and we have managed to add them into LAMS using what we call a Tool Adapter.

These Tool Adapters are mainly wrappers of the external tool and act like a bridge between LAMS and LMS tool. The good thing about these Tool Adapters is that they *really* make the external LMS tool to behave as if they would be just another LAMS tool.

So for instance even if the .LRN and Moodle Forums won't know anything about a LAMS sequence, we have managed to make them workflow aware. Do you use Groupings in LAMS, no problems, the .LRN Forum now is group aware too!

Additionally, you can use the output of a .LRN or Moodle Forum to create conditions for branching! How cool is that!

And that's not all... one of the important aspects of LAMS is that you should be able to export your designs and take them with you to another server... But LMS tools don't have an export/import for content for single activities... well, with the Tool Adapters, you can create .LRN or Moodle Forums as part of the sequences and when you export the sequence all the content from those forums will be *in* the export package you get! So if you going to another LAMS-Moodle or LAMS-.LRN Server, you can reimport that without a glitch. This is *true* tools interoperability

But enough words for now... if you want to try this for yourself, have a look a the animations and then play with the demo server (you would need to get accounts -if you don't have them already in the demo servers):

Moodle:

* Animations
* Demo server
* Full implementation details


.LRN

* Animations
* Demo server
* Full implementation details

So it wouldn't be crazy to think that in the near future you can have all of the LMSs tool working in LAMS and with the other LAMS tool... given you a lot more flexibility to create great activities in your sequences.

We are currently working on a similar adapter for Sakai and hopefully we can give you a demo on it in the next few weeks.

The future plan is to keep testing and develop these Tool Adapters with the help of their respective LMS communities and include them in LAMS 2.2.

Any questions, comments and suggestions are very very welcome.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione