Forum LAMS Newsletter: LAMS Newsletter 101, 15th Feb 2012

By: James Dalziel

[ Forward ]

LAMS 2.4 coming soon - new features

We plan to release LAMS V2.4 by the end of March, and it will have many great new features, as well as major backend improvements. Here are some of the new features:

Conditional lesson release: When creating a lesson you can specify if another previous lesson must be completed before the lesson is available for students. Once the learners complete the pre-requisite lesson(s), then the lesson becomes available.

Scheduled and instant notifications: A very powerful new feature that enhances LAMS tracking and communication capabilities. You can set LAMS to notify students (or teachers) when students reach a certain activity, or fail to start (or finish) a sequence by a certain date, etc.

Mobile devices support for learners: When a learner uses a mobile interface to access a lesson, LAMS will automatically provide a non-flash interface and some of the most frequently used tools will switch to a mobile friendly interface - great for iPhones and iPads!

Faster Gradebook excel exports: Now you can download gradebooks for an entire course or specifically for a subgroup.

Ratings for Q&A and Forum: Student can now rate answers and postings of other students (if enabled by teacher).

Assessment now implements question pools: Teachers can export and import sets of questions into any assessment activity and specifically select which questions to be used.

New Tools:
- IMS Basic LTI
- Web conferencing using BigBlueButton
- Kaltura video integration
- Wookie widget engine
- Adobe Captivate and Articulate tool


Moodle 2 and LAMS integration completed

While the Moodle 2 integration for LAMS has been out for sometime, we've now implemented all the requirements for a "stable" integration module for Moodle 2, including extra features like grade book integration and backups. For full details see:
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/message-view?message_id=1364167

Note that this does not include the "deep integration" of allowing Moodle tools to be dragged and dropped in LAMS sequence authoring - we hope to implement this later this year.


Call for Paper on LAMS and Learning Design
The Journal of Teaching English with Technology (TEwT) invites you to submit articles for its fourth special issue on Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) and/or Learning Design. The editors are interested in all theoretical and practical articles that help to draw light on some of the key threads in current LAMS and Learning Design literature. Republication of articles or revised versions of articles that have appeared in past LAMS conferences will also be considered

Submissions due now! For further details see http://www.tewtjournal.org/TEWT2011CALL.doc


LAMS Community Stats as of: February 15, 2012

Users: 7378
Number of Sequences: 899
Sequences downloaded: 16092 times
Sequences Previewed: 17989 times
Forum Postings: 7298
Translations to: 32 languages

Posted by James Dalziel