Forum LAMS Lounge Forum: Where are the IMS XML files?

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Ben,

Here is the work we did with Oxford on exporting LAMS sequences as IMS LD level A as part of the JISC Tool Interoperability Project.

In our current version of LAMS 1.0.2, we aren't able to export sequences in IMS LD level A. The current XML file that is produced when exporting a sequence is LAMS' own "proprietary" XML schema. In the TIP Project LD section you can read about the mappings between LAMS LD to IMS LD level A.

LAMS 1.1 (the new re-write of LAMS) will allow you to export in IMS LD level A with LAMS extentions, IMS LD level A without LAMS extensions and LAMS LD XML.

Additionally, you can find a lot of materials about LAMS and IMS LD, their differences, similarities, etc in the Foundation's resources page, two that you might want to have a look:

• JISC Report: Review of Learning Design: Concept, Specification and Tools by Sandy Britain
• Activity Tools for Learning Design: Lessons from developing LAMS by James Dalziel

I hope that helps. If you have any further questions or comments, let us know. Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Benjamin Jones

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Thank you, I enjoyed the material you sent me. Have you documented this additional markup under an opensource license? Or is this the "proprietary" XML required to express the richness captured in the area summarised by:
J. R. Dalziel; LESSONS FROM LAMS; 2.2.2 (3-6)

2.2.2.3 Need a user grouping concept, not just a role concept;
2.2.2.4 Need an ability to pass roles/groups and tool information across Acts;
2.2.2.5 More detailed concepts of sequencing within "Acts”, including within-Act multi-learner synchronisation, and Simple Sequencing;
2.2.2.6 More development of how a teacher monitors and approves actions in real-time during a complex, multi-task (including dependencies) activity sequence.

If so I would like to propose these extentions to our e-learning committee. I suppose, I hope, that it may be that this markup is required for technical reasons extraneous to teaching in a wider context and that it may be mapped to pre-existing IMS tags. However, if this is not so then it may, as it hints at, takes us nearer to the holy grail or the possibility of delivering lessons such as those inspired by Dogme or the constructivists discovery methods: created in lesson "runtime"; but be self documenting for the ever watchful inspectors of schools and colleges.
Yours,

Ben Jones - bjones@staff.conel.ac.uk

Posted by Benjamin Jones

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Ben,

I forgot to add this paper to my previous list. I believe you will find it very interesting as it's a collaboration by a great group of Moodlers on how to integration IMS LD to Moodle.

> Have you documented this additional markup under an opensource license?

Yes, as this is part of the LAMS distribution, it also falls under the GPL license.

> If so I would like to propose these extentions to our e-learning committee.

Well, it depends of what you want to do. Would you mind sharing what you and your committee are after?

As a notation language, IMS LD does allow you to map a fair amount. However, there are certain runtime aspects of that are tricky (as you read on the documents). If you could tell me what you are after, maybe we can help out? We've done a fair amount of research and also a bit of work with the IMS LD fellows on this area so hopefully we can help.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Benjamin Jones

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Thank you Ernie, yes of course. The e-learning committee at conel promotes e-learning across the college, addressing the problem of uptake. At conel e-learning is mostly courseware development, of two main types: diagnostics (authored in a variety of unpleasant tools, in a variety of unpleasant ways); and course-ware for the virtual learning environment web CT. I represent a group, of lectures across the college who made the following presentation to the e-learning committee:

There is little benefit in buying courseware: that can't be adapted; or turn-key resourcing that is obsolescent when curriculum are revised; or as a reaction to educational policy change.

Whatever the tools the core data remains the same, therefore a specification of that data should be the focus of investment.

Rather that corseware, conel needs meta-data embedded in resources: meta-data descriptive of our core activity (teaching) and that promotes good practice, allowing deployment of these resources in a variety of educational contexts; integrating resources into lessons without system redesign or changes to current operations procedures (like lesson planning).

This specification will lead to tools that make lighter work of the processes of:
1. - lesson and activity preparation;
2. - the distribution of lesson and activities;
3. - the processing of paperwork or assessment, perhaps, without computers in the teaching environment, but say during lesson evaluation;
tools:
4. - to suggest computer enhancement of traditionally prepared lessons;
5. - that sequence resources and activities during (lesson development) by the use of meta-data attached to those resources;
6. - to allow for runtime, dogme, style classes that have been highly praised and place the needs of the learners first;

and above all tools that intergrate differentiation, track learner progress, and ensure quality.

This resulted in a commission to either write a schema, or find a good fit and map this to operational documentation. We found IMS after weighing the relative merits of others, and a frankly hairy appreciation of the magnitude of the task of creating one for ourselves. Our group has a declared interest in opensource (for example and for reasons of GUI I am about to pilot Moodle for our ESOL learners in the computer aided learning program) for the advantages of shared development, adaptability, maintenance, cost, leverage of skills, and transparency, not to mention ethical reasons associated with the responsibility of a college whose student body is made up of many asylum seekers and refugees. LAMS is currently the most exciting of the tools compliant with our schema of choice, and my favourite. Yours, Ben Jones - bjones@staff.conel.ac.uk

Posted by Benjamin Jones

By: James Dalziel

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Hi Ben,

Glad you've found this helpful. There is a long and sometimes unfortunate history to the relationship between IMS LD and LAMS. Now is not the time to tell it, let me just summarise a few key points related to this discussion:

(1) When Ernie says LAMS "proprietary" XML schema, it does not mean our XML is secret - it is all there in plain text to look at. In the very early days of LAMS, this was not available - we used to export an encrypted file where the format really was secret (in fact, you can see an example of this in a presentation I gave to a CETIS meeting on Digital Libraries in October 2003 - see slide 14 of the attached file). But we've long since stopped doing this, and so anyone is free to inspect the XML as plain text.

(2) While there is some documentation of LAMS V1.0.* XML in the TIP report and others Ernie mentions, any lack of documentation for this is just due to lack of time, not any deliberate decision not to document the format. Our main efforts in this area are going into the major new version of LAMS (V1.1), which will include three XML formats - LAMS LD, IMS LD Level A (no extensions), and IMS LD Level A (+ extensions required to make it work in LAMS). I suspect the third of these may be of most interest to you (when it is released - it's not there yet!) as it will illustrate what we could map to IMS LD Level A, and what LAMS needed but which didn't map to anything in the IMS spec.

(3) In terms of my suggestions for changes, these have been shared with the IMS LD community since the very beginning (in fact, they were presented at the Valkenburg meeting held the day after the IMS meeting where IMS LD was approved!). There are still no formal plans for revisions to the IMS LD spec even today, so while it may be of use for you to propose changes in your local context, the wider issue of revisions remains unsolved.

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Benjamin Jones

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One may read to much into text formatting, it's true. Your relationship with IMS seems to have been a fertile one; and fortunate for many; we are counting ourselves as some these. Thank you for all this information.
Developing transformations that attach additional markup, to facilitating deployment, is valuable especially when considering the benefits of supporting communication (such as student chat, and cross fertilisation) not within the scope of the IMS learning design; and not too difficult to implement, I'm thinking, when the documentation is available (If I can help there I would be happy to try). I'm interested in the details, of course, and the implications for our development (that organises differentiation in learning based on an assessment that's compliant with the IMS question and test interoperability spec., and the prerequisites of activity tags specified in the IMS LD schema). A project which will also be available under the General Public Licence. So far the destiny of this project is uncertain, and the direction of my development efforts, is still dependent on the shape of project such as LAMS, whether as part of LAMS localy or free standing as middle-ware of some kind. Yours, Ben Jones - bjones@staff.conel.ac.uk

Posted by Benjamin Jones

By: James Dalziel

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Look forward to seeing how your work progresses, and how LAMS can assist. Two things coming out in the future of LAMS that go beyond IMS LD might interest you:

(1) In our next major release (V1.1), all tools can be run in "offline" mode as well as "online" mode. This means that if you want to get students to debate a concept, you can fill in details of, say, what the topic is, initial pro and con arguments to consider, etc. This is separate from specifying *how* the debate is run, ie, with a chat room online, or face to face without online tech. If you choose face to face as the delivery mode, LAMS would just present a simple text screen at the relevant point saying that the task is run offline. To assist teachers running in "offline" mode, sequence authors can store extra information in LAMS about how the face to face task is run - eg, a printable instruction sheet for teachers on how to run the debate face to face, suggested examples, ways to manage difficult issues, etc; you could also have printable sheet especially for students with, say, the name of the topic, issues to consider, etiquette for debating, etc. Once this feature is implemented, LAMS becomes a generalised lesson planning tool (not just an "e-learning" tool) - with the option to run any given activity either online, or instead print out information sheets on what to do face to face (or most likely, a combination of both to suit your context).

On a personal note, this feature seems to me to be of fundamental conceptual importance - it make LAMS more than just a nifty e-learning tool - it becomes a generalised framework for modelling and delivering education. I noted this in a presentation for the UK Specialist Schools Trust/BECTA LAMS evaluation in Nov 04 - I've uploaded the presentation to accompany this post - see slide 11. These slides include some further details on the history (and future) of LAMS.

(2) In the version after our next major release (ie, in V1.2), we're hoping to allow teachers to edit running sequences "on-the-fly". This means a teacher who has started a sequence, and has students part way through it, can choose to edit the remaining activities in the sequence. In practice, the desire to change things mid-stream is quite common for teachers - you get halfway through teaching something and realise your plans for the rest of the lesson need changing (either due to new ideas, or students heading in a different direction to that expected, etc). So in LAMS V1.2, we're planning to allow "on-the-fly" sequence editing. You can already guess at where this will be implemented by looking at the "sequence" tab of the Monitor environment!

NB: You'll only be able to edit tasks that no student has started - if any student is already withint an activity, then this will not be editable (it would be too confusing for students to be kicked out of an activity they were in, and then discover it was gone!).

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Peter Miller

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I have actually been in a situation where it *would* be useful to teleport a student in difficulty out of an activity and prevent subsequent students encountering same, viz when a third-party page in Share Resources had been modified so that it could no longer be hijacked by the lower frame and the upper instructions frame disappeared. Under those circumstances it was impossible to complete the activity and the entire sequence was blocked. My feeling is that LAMS should warn the teacher but allow the edit to be made. Maybe there should be an alert box so that the teacher can post warnings to students in advance of such serious edits? Or maybe this is just too complex -- I like the relative simplicity of LAMS as it stands.

Posted by Peter Miller