Forum Higher Ed & Training Forum: Re: Re: Instructions Tab Question

Very good point about an instructions page for the whole sequence.

Currently, there's a description page for a sequence in the Properties tab when you save it (see picture). However, those instructions are also displayed to students so you might want to clear it in the Advance tab when you create a lesson.

Tutors are able to see this instructions in Monitor.

At any rate, I have created this task http://bugs.lamsfoundation.org/browse/LDEV-2437 so we address this as well.

Thanks Neal,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

As Ernie mentioned, the main idea behind having both online and offline instructions was to allow for an activity in a sequence to be run either way - so you might have an idea for a sequence that has a discussion at step 3, but you feel this could be run either online or offline depending on the context, so in this case, you could give advice on how to do each type of delivery.

Having said that, it's a rarely used feature, but as it isn't seen by students, it doesn't interfere with them. I keep it in LAMS because it indicates the deeper idea about Learning Designs - that they are not just about e-learning, but often they are a more general pedagogical idea which could be delivered online or offline (or a mixture).

I agree that we need somewhere for "sequence-level" description/advice and that this is not well catered for at the moment, and hopefully we can do something for this in the future as Ernie suggests.

From a different angle, our recent work on the Activity Planner provides a different way of providing advice on a sequence to a teacher - for details, see
wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/planner

Another approach to this was a standardised template of advice to go with sequence that we did some time ago as part of some work by LAMS International - see the doc at
http://lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/files/GlobalWarming_TG.pdf?file%5frev%5fid=278811
which accompanies the sequence
http://lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq_id=278809

Hope this helps!

James

Posted by James Dalziel

I do understand the reasoning behind the 2 instruction sets; however I did find it all a bit confusing. The notion that one would add offline instructions to an online teaching and learning application totally escaped me.

Thanks for the link to the Global Warming lesson and the sequence information form, which I think servers as a great template for some future built-in sequence or lesson instructions.

I noticed that one of the activities in the global warming sequence was having the students collaborate on a PowerPoint presentation. I discovered a way to incorporate this directly into LAMS via Google Docs which has a PowerPoint-like presentation application that can be edited (online) by a group of students. I have a course I use for demo purposes called “Shakespeare’s Birds” and I have created a LAMS activity to demonstrate how this works. It has one activity called Group Presentation which is actually a simple Noticeboard activity with an embedded "iframe" tag.

I created a Google account for the group and set-up the initial pages of a shared presentation. Anyone that accesses the activity can edit the presentation. Once completed (or even in the editing stage) Google provides a read only URL as well; so a Share Resources activity could be placed somewhere later in the sequence to share the presentation with the whole class or a Submit Files activity if it is to be marked and graded.

I have attached the exported LAMS zip file Here . You can import and preview this lesson and try editing it yourself (just follow the directions on the activity page). This can be done with spreadsheets or text documents as well. If the students have their own Google account, there is even no need to create a separate account for the activity. Just a link to the presentation file itself allows anyone (with an account) whom the presentation is shared (for editing purposes) to edit the presentation.

BTW: I attended your excellent presentation at the Sakai Conference in Boston last July. The LAMS Activity Planner is light years ahead of other teaching and learning system concepts. I look forward to working with it.

Neal Hirsig
Tufts University

Posted by Neal Hirsig