Forum LAMS Lounge Forum: Re: Remote learning

By: James Dalziel

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One of the less well known features of LAMS is the "offline activities" - you can see it in the Properties bar for each tool in the main Authoring environment (Properties is the bar at the very bottom of the screen - it pop open when you click on it).

For an animated walkthrough of how this feature works, see
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lamsdocs/Creating+Offline+Activities

The idea behind this feature was that if you had a simple sequence where, say, you had some websites to view a Share Resources tool, then a discussion using a Forum, you could designate the discussion as "offline". This would mean that when students get to this task on their computer, it shows a message saying that the task is being done face to face, and they should see their teacher for details. LAMS doesn't "run" the discussion forum tool at this point - it just gives the offline message.

As a result, you have still captured the intention of the design (having a discussion at step 2), even though you might not do every task on the computer. Another byproduct is that if you changed your mind and did want to run the task on a computer, you simply uncheck the box, and the next time you launch this sequence with students, you'll get a Forum.

As Bronwen notes, you can also add instructions for teachers in the Instructions tab of the relevant tool to give advice on how the task is to be run offline.

So.... if I understand your context, you could use LAMS for lesson structuring (to show teachers the recommended structure of tasks), and also to present content (if you had a single computer and a projector, you could run the sequence and show students the websites from the first task on the project), but then when it comes to the discussion, you would run this face to face - and LAMS would give you a reminded of this on the projector when you reach this task.

I hope this helps - let me know if I've misunderstood or you'd like more thoughts on this.

Best wishes,

James

Posted by James Dalziel