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

By: Benjamin Jones

[ Reply | Forward ]

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

[ Reply | Forward ]

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

[ Reply | Forward ]

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