Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: Re: SAKAI GUEST THREAD: What are the use cases for workflow in a high ed learning environment?

By: James Dalziel

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Yes, I think these are all real use cases that we see in the field with LAMS - let me provide some examples below (apologies for the long post, but it's a rich topic):


You have a well-defined process (e.g., a case study discussion method) that you want to apply as systematically as possible while saving as much authoring labor as possible

An example of a case study discussion method in LAMS could be:
Step 1: Noticeboard tool to introduce the topic and objectives (and potentially explain any formal assessment)
Step 2: Q&A or voting tool to get students to reflect on their own initial ideas about the topic, and for the collated answers to provide a basis for future discussion and debate (this step is useful pedagogically as it gets students to put forward a view before they read the case study, and hence provides a basis for future discussion with others, and for reflection on how a student's views might change over the course of the case study discussion).
Step 3: Share Resources tool to present the case study, as well as any other relevant resources (these could be URLs, a file such as a document, video, etc, and/or whole websites uploaded into LAMS). Depending on the pedagogy behind your approach, you may or may not encourage students to find their own related materials and share these with the class (student sharing is an optional feature for this tool in LAMS)
Step 4: Forum tool with a number of specific question or topic threads to prompt student discussion and debate (or possibly Chat if your context would prefer synchronous communication rather than asynchronous communication)
Step 5: There are many options to consider at this stage - perhaps you introduce a different case study at this point (maybe one that diverges from the ideas of the first), then follow it with further discussion; perhaps you break students into small groups to work on a particular aspect of the original case study; perhaps you have another Q&A/vote to see how students ideas may have developed or changed. You could even use the LAMS Optional activity box to include all of the above as optional activities, and to allow students to choose. For the sake of simplicity, I'll leave aside these various options, and assume that you now want to wrap up with an assessment - eg, use the Submit File tool for students to submit an essay or reflective report (or possibly the Multiple Choice tool if a quiz is appropriate to your context and topic).

This is just one example of using a LAMS sequence to capture a particular pedagogical approach. There are many others - you could create a role-play sequence, a problem-based learning sequence, etc - it's just up to the imagination of the author.


You want to encourage faculty to share best practices, particularly across similar courses or multiple sections of the same course.

Taking the example above, you might have created this case study discussion sequence centrally (ie, in an teaching support group) as a template, and then used it as a way of sharing good pedagogical practice with your faculty, but relying on them to fill in the discipline specific information (eg, the case study itself, the discussion topics, etc).

Another option is that one of your faculty has already created this and had a good experience using it, so this is then disseminated "peer-to-peer" among faculty - potentially without any "central" facilitation.

Another option is that someone uploads this sequence to the LAMS Community (or any other shared repository), and then other faculty find it, review it, and then decide to use it (either with or without changes).

Returning to the idea of the original faculty member using it for other purposes within the existing course, you could re-use the same structure again and again for different topics, but with different content inserted into the sequence (and potentially with small variations in structure to keep things interesting). Using this approach, the effort required to create the initial template then pays off with rapid re-use and adaptation for subsequent topics.

And to make sure I'm eating my own dog food here (so to speak), I've uploaded a simple version of the sequence I described above into the R&D repository area of the LAMS Community. I've based the content on the topic we're discussing now - Learning Design (please forgive me if this seems a bit self-referential). If you'd like to have a look at or use this sequence, it's available at:
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/educationalcommunity/lamsresearchdevelopment/lams-seq//sequence?seq%5fid=244060
(to view it in action, you'll need to download the file, and then upload it into a LAMS authoring account using the "Import File" feature under the File menu. If you don't have a LAMS account, you can get a free trial account immediately from http://www.lamscommunity.org/testdrive


You want to work with faculty to think more explicitly about instructional design by giving them an authoring tool that helps them to formalize their curricular planning.

The simple five step sequence above might capture the heart of your well defined process. You could use this as a template for faculty to then fill in the details of their specific topic; you could use it as a prompt for faculty to start with, allowing them to add to it/adapt it to suit their specific context (eg, adding some of the options suggested). You might just use it as an "idea starter" example, where faculty build their own sequences from scratch, but informed by the examples of others that they've seen in the past. This third option has been quite popular with LAMS, given the simple "drag and drop" approach to creating new sequences.

To take a more sobering but common real life scenario - in a context where you have lectures and tutorials in your course (as a faculty instructor), but your tutors just tend to give mini-lectures rather than using the opportunity of small group teaching for small group appropriate tasks (a costly and inefficient mistake), then this example might help them to see other ways of running the class - *even if they never run it using technology*.

This final point has been quite important to a number of people using LAMS - they use it as a modelling and professional development tool, and whether or not they actually run the sequence online with students is not the point. In LAMS V2, we extend this idea further by allowing every tool to have an "offline" mode, so you could model a sequence in LAMS authoring, but then instead of running it using online tasks, you could run it all offline, in which case LAMS can print out lesson plans, advice to faculty on how to run on each task, student worksheets, etc.


You want your students to do some meta-cognitive work around scaffolding processes by having them author sequences

For me, this has been one of the great unexpected successes of the past year - students authoring their own sequences once they have authoring rights in LAMS. We've seen this used to great effect in university teacher training courses - have a look at some of the posts from Leanne Cameron in the LAMS Community (a number of sequences from her students are already in the sequence repository - such as the great "Choosing a Mobile Phone" example).

But perhaps even more amazing is the use of LAMS by Glenorie Public school, a K-6 school in Sydney. They've been getting 10-11 year old students to experiment with authoring sequences for younger students - just amazing! Look out for posts from Debbie Evans and Karen May in the LAMS Community for more on this.

(Whenever I hear people suggest that LAMS is too hard for faculty of understand, I find it hard not to think of the Glenorie students!)


You want to reduce the complexity of complex processes for students by using a workflow engine to automate their navigation between steps

In very pragmatic terms, one of the most useful features of LAMS from the student's point of view is that it manages the flow of tasks on their behalf, and presents each one when needed without any special student effort. If you tried to do the same sort of activities that are common in LAMS within a typical LMS, this seamless management of the flow of tasks is what would be most noticably lacking to students. The reason is that you'd need to keep typing text instructions all over your LMS tell students "when you've finished this, go over there, and then when you've done that, go over there, and then after that, come back here, etc". The reality of this in a typical LMS is a quite fragmented learning experience for students (which leads to them losing interest, giving up, and complaining about poor quality online experiences) - whereas a Learning Design system should (in my view) make all this part of one seamless flow of tasks for students (which they like, and quite frankly, expect).

(The seamless management of a flow of tasks also has big implications for faculty - as they can see a unified view of the progress of all their students through a sequence of activities in real time - see the "Sequence" tab in LAMS Monitor); whereas this view doesn't exist in any typical LMS - all the LMS provides (at best) is some logging of activity within each individual tool - but no unified view of the real-time "flow").

Posted by James Dalziel