Forum Getting Started: Re: What do people use for authoring sequences?

By: James Dalziel

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I forgot to mention another take on patterns/templates - LAMS Author Xpress. This is an idea we've been playing around with internally, but haven't released. You can see early screenshots in slides 18-22 at http://www.lamsfoundation.org/CD/html/resources/presentations/LAMS.JISCeval.AstonUniConference.Jan05.ppt

Here's a summary of how Author Xpress works:

Step 1: Choose a type of delivery mode (eg, synchronous, asynchronous, mixed, single-learner).

Step 2: Choose from a set of 5-7 template sequences that have been pre-built to suit your chosen style of delivery.

Step 3: Use a special authoring approach which shows all activities on one webpage, but with only the key content fields needed to finish the template (NB: the rest of the fields and settings are already done as part of the template).

Step 4: Save and run it (or open in full authoring to edit those fields/settings not shown).

The concept is to support rapid authoring either for new users, or those who are happy to go with the existing template settings and edit jut the key content fields.

There are some similarities between this approach and my suggestion (2) above, except that (so far) we don't provide advice on how to edit the content for Author Xpress; and the Author Xpress decision process helps teachers choose a sequence to suit their context, rather than expecting teachers to search through the whole LAMS sequence repository to find something appropriate.

I expect we'll probably "hard code" Author Xpress in the first instance, but eventually I'd like to see an editor for Author Xpress itself, so anyone could create their own Author Xpress decision process (potentially built on different decisions) and using their own templates. This would allow for a wide range of decision processes and sets of templates, each with their own pedagogical assumptions, but all built on a common technical environment.

Posted by James Dalziel