Forum Getting Started: Re: Adaptive LAMS?

By: James Dalziel

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Ernie's right that branching is a key feature planned for future releases of LAMS.

However, there are still some things you can do today - although not as elegantly as in the future.

The simplest adaptive feature today is in the Multiple Choice Quiz tool, where you can set a pass mark. This allows you to, say, provide some content and discussion activities, then run the quiz, and if students don't get a high enough mark, you can direct them back to the original resources for further review, then they can come back and take the test again.

An elaboration on this is that you could have two sets of content (one after another), where you name the first content as "required" and then have a second set of content as "additional", with instructions that all students do the required material, but only those who fail the later test (or who feel they need additional study) should do the additional material (the rest can just click "Finished" immediately on the second set of content to skip it). In this way, you can incorporate extra content into a sequence for those who might need it without making everyone do it. The instructions for the quiz could say something like "return to the additional content for futher study if you don't achieve the pass mark for the quiz".

A third approach to branching is to have an Optional activity that contains several activities of the same type, but with different topics - eg, several Share Resources but with different content. You could then have a Grouping task before this, and then in the instructions for the Optional activity, explain that students should select the content according to their group (you could name the Share Resources tasks by group number, or by topic area, to help facilitate this). Another approach is to have a Multiple Choice quiz before the Optional activity, and then your instructions could say something like "If you scored 9 or 10 out of 10, then do topic A, if you scored 6-8, then do topic B, if you scored 5 or lower, do topic C".

The point is that with some careful design and some text-based instructions, you can still do interesting adaptive things with LAMS today. In the future version of LAMS, we'll be able to automate much of this so it isn't necessary to rely on the students to choose the path you want for them - the system can help do this (of course, you could still give students choices as well!).

Posted by James Dalziel