Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: Re: Re: SAKAI GUEST THREAD: When is workflow *not* appropriate?

By: James Dalziel

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Just a quick comment on Karen's suggestion that a workflow tool (like LAMS) is not the right choice unless you have collaboration.

For me (and I think for Karen), the really interesting and new aspect of Learning Design is sequences of collaborative activities (and the ability to share them) - while there are other dimensions to the LD field (such as allowing different single learner pathways through content), these have parallels in other work (such as traditional websites, or IMS Simple Sequencing, etc). That's not to say these things aren't relevant or important, it's just that for me, they don't define the dimension of Learning Design that is really new. The new bit as I see it is:
(1) Sequences of collaborative activities (may also include content)
(2) The ability to easily share these sequences

However, having said all that, I do know of quite a few LAMS users that like LAMS's visual drag and drop approach for sequencing "single learner" only sequences (eg, view content, view content, do quiz, etc). Using LAMS just for single learner activity sequences doesn't use all the power of the collaboration dimension of LAMS, but if it suits a particular pedagogy in a particular circumstance, and the visualisation is helpful, then I'm all for this type of use of LAMS.

I hope that for some faculty who start out using LAMS in this way, over time they'll start to consider bringing in some collaborative tasks (but only if it suits their teaching context - no point in doing so if, as Karen say, no one is ever online and you might as well post out printed notes and have students post back assignments).

Posted by James Dalziel