Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: New Authoring environment (LAMS 2.4): Your input is needed!

By: Daniel Schneider

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For starters: Ergonomics and functions of Data collection tool

All answers should just display normally (instead of displaying text answers in small scrolling windows). E.g. when one clicks on the LIST tab in the data collection tool or Display all entries from the Sequences TAB in the monitoring tool.

Also, it would be nice to be able to have other views. E.g. list just the data (without repetition of the questions), list answers for one questions for all learners ...

Even better: Author might create specific views for the learners to look at. Basically I'd like to have a simple database creation + views creation tool such as the ones you could find in Zoho or Google sites :)

Would be quite a cool tool for inquiry learning.

- cheers !

Posted by Daniel Schneider

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Daniel,

Happy New Year!

Thanks for your comments on Data collection. They are indeed useful and I have created a task for it so it can be reviewed for future work on that tool. (see http://bugs.lamsfoundation.org/browse/LDEV-2485)

However, the review of the Authoring environment refers to the Authoring Flash Interface more than changes in each authoring activity pages. Specifically we'll be changing this interface: http://is.gd/5KeGq

If you can suggest any comments on the Flash Authoring interface, that'll be great!

Thank you,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Just to add to this, there's work by James Dalziel on different views for LAMS Author. Here's his presentation at the LAMS Conference in Sydney in 2008:


Closing Keynote: New approaches to visualising Learning Designs - James Dalziel [Audio]

We will be working on these visual representations as well, so any comment/feedback is very welcome!

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: James Dalziel

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I really like the idea of adding comments on top of the authoring view - annotations about what a set of activities might be for or other comments about the way the sequence has been put together.

For example, a role play normally has 4 sections (Background; Pre-role Play Preparation; Role Play Proper; Post Role Play Reflection), so it would be great if you could draw a box around each section and add a text note so you know which section is which - this way, even through there might be several activity tools within a section, you can see the overall "chunks" of a sequence.

I think comments can help convey the educational rationale for a sequence in an easy to digest way - so I hope we can add this!

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Spyros Papadakis

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Spyros suggestions

8) Image – icons on Activities Tools and Monitoring to see each other and make a warmer climate running the activities
9) A survey tool from which easily you can transfer and analyze the results in to a Statistical Package (e.g. SPSS, Excel)
10) A SCORM player for Share Resources
11) We need a better organization for “My Groups”
• A Notice board for welcome, announcements and general advices/suggestions
• A calendar to remind learners the deadlines
• A list of participants with learners (and tutor) to see each other's pictures and maybe a short text about them
12) More log data for real time monitoring and supporting our students (e.g. When do our student have started an activity and not only the average time it took them to finish)

Posted by Spyros Papadakis

By: Daniel Schneider

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I agree with Spyros that community tools are essential for a virtual environment. Students do need an impression of "being there" (but they ought to be given the option to remain invisible).
At some point there ought to be a discussion whether LAMS is meant to be a tool for short term activities (1-2 hours) that run within an LMS or whether it would support longer activities in which case various awareness tools (who is here, who is doing what, etc.) do become crucial.

I don't agree for SCORM (since adding a fully compatible player will cost). LAMS is interesting, because it is *not* SCORM. IMHO, Moodle lost its appeal because they invested in supporting IMS CP formats instead of improving their learner tools (horrible wiki, no document system, etc.). Also SCORM 1.2 is an awful kludge made by/for people who can't program. Real programmers ought to be able to implement standards like simple sequencing (but that would be in contraction with the LAMS sequencing tools). Anyhow to sum it up: Scorm may be expensive to implement and more importantly if LAMS goes towards ADL/IMS standards it will loose its appeal and become tied up in implementing all sorts of other boring standards (you could add quizzing, student records and lots of others ...).
I vote that LAMS ought to invest into supporting various project-oriented learning scenarios. That implies: more and better learner tools, loops in the sequencing (!), better feedback and monitoring tools for the teachers, access to persistent knowledge databases, etc.

The noticeboard would be a good idea (we both don't mean the HTML tool that already exists), but indeed something that would display information each time students comes back. It might integrate the calendar.

I already complained about "My Groups" :) Very confusing indeed to use "groups" in sequencing and also for talking about organisation of classes and courses. Actually I promised Ernie to help with localization in the future. One of the most important issues I identified is the need for terminology management, i.e. some sort of common grounding of essential terms through a multi-lingual thesaurus.

Being able to export/import data is also an interesting idea, since there are needs for processing that can not be implemented within LAMS at reasonable cost. (maybe there are other data than the surveys, e.g. the data collector). In the same spirit one could think about data views available in other tools. E.g. be able to include survey data in the wiki....

- cheers !

Posted by Daniel Schneider

By: John Faig

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Just a simple suggestion that has nothing to do with the underlying development environment... It would be great to have the ability to branch based on some student profile data. An example that comes to mind is the learning style of a student (e.g., visual, auditory, tactile). There could be three different activities based on their preferred learning styles. This may be overkill for a particular step, but very important for an assessment at the end of an activity.

Posted by John Faig

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Good point, John.

Having a branching conditions based on the student's profile data is actually not hard to do... what it's very tricky is to define the student's profile

We were working with a really good team of universities and research organizations in Spain on this, but unfortunately the project had funding problems and the student profiling bits in LAMS got dropped. However, these guys are still working on defining a relevant student profile that should have learning styles, accessibility and other characteristics. (See http://www.ines.org.es/flexo/ English via Google translations: http://goo.gl/DRoz)

As of today, you could set a teacher choose branching activity, so the teacher can allocate students to different branches (and each branch will be according to different learning styles). Again, not automatic branching but doable.

Also the other option is to use Optional Sequences, and at the beginning of Optional Sequence explain to the student which branch is for each learning style and let them choose according to what they think their best learning style would be...

Again, not as cool as have this automated, but hey...

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: sridhar joies

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1. Students to User Rich Text Editor while answering
assessment Question

2. Assigning Different Roles to Students inside the activity.

3. Rate (Ratings like Good,Needs Improvement,Excellent e.t c)against the Competencies attached to the activity. Which can be exported with the portfolio and can be attached to the grade book.

I will add some more.....

Posted by sridhar joies

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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> 1. Students to User Rich Text Editor while answering
> assessment Question

This is in LAMS 2.3.4 (which I should be testing now so it's out shortly!)

> 2. Assigning Different Roles to Students inside the activity.

Can you elaborate on this a bit more? What different roles do you see in activities for students?

> 3. Rate (Ratings like Good,Needs Improvement,Excellent e.t c)against the Competencies attached to the activity. Which
> can be exported with the portfolio and can be attached to the grade book.

We are working on this... hopefully for 2.4 we will be able to integrate Evalcomix, a brilliant evaluation system by Universidad de Cadiz that would give LAMS a great flexibility for students to evaluate each other contributions to activities, students to perform self-evaluations and teacher to evaluate students. I'm hoping we can have a demo for this after 2.3.4

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: sridhar joies

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Let us take an example of an Activity by Name "Virtual Oil Spill" where we represent the videos and flash files two give an idear on oil spill virtually

Where we find the Roles like

1.Coastguard
2.Emergency Services
3.Oil Company
4.Environmentalist
5.Local Resident
6.Ships Captain
7.Media

so students take one role and act in Discussion forum and share the ideas.

To Extend .....

Student login to a flash tool and they find their avtar there and perform the rescue operation (virtually)

Posted by sridhar joies

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Sridhar,

There are examples of role play sequences in LAMS. Here's one by James Dalziel:

http://lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq_id=690433
or a simpler option
http://lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq_id=924470

I think you can do what you are suggestion even today defining roles and branches, right?

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione