Forum LAMS Lounge Forum: Thoughts from users at the University of Sheffield

By: Fiona Malikoff

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Ian,

Thanks for the thoughts. Certainly some of this may be addressed by what we are looking at in branching, but I'm doubt it will be as completely flexible as all your staff want. But the work we are doing now on branching won't be the end of it, so keep the ideas coming!

As for your staff member who likes to throw a lot of information and let them make up their own mind - I hope he uses lots of Optional Activities.

One of the things that does take a fair amount of work (for the LAMS developers) when we make sequencing more complex is the actual layout on the authoring screen. For example, one idea that has been suggested more than once is to put a sequence of activities within an optional activity - so instead of having to do 2 of 4 possible single activities within an optional activity, the learner might choose to do 2 of 4 possible "mini designs".

Much of the work to do this has already been done on the "back end", but how do we represent it on the authoring screen? What would make sense to users? How would we represent it in the progress bar in learner? In the learner progress tab in monitoring?

So we are also open to any ideas you or your staff have on what would feel natural to them. Now, we can't guarantee we will do it that way - we have to throw out many of our own ideas as they just aren't feasible technically.

Regards,

Fiona

Posted by Fiona Malikoff

By: James Dalziel

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Hi Ian,

Thanks for the initial thoughts, look forward to more in due course.

The linear nature of LAMS is partly a byproduct of where we started the development (it's the simplest kind of workflow, although no workflow system is simple to build!), but we will soon go beyond this with three important new features in V2.1:

(1) Branching - the ability for students to go down different paths; and the related feature which will allow you to use data out of previous tools to determine pathways (eg, quiz score above 7 out of 10, go here; otherwise, go there).
(2) "Floating activities" - that is, support activities for a sequence that don't sit "within" the sequence itself (ie, not in the linear flow), but sit outside it as general support if/when they are needed. NB: Suggestions for a better name are most welcome!
(3) Live Edit (I used to call this "edit-on-the-fly") - the ability to edit the structure of a sequence even when it is running with students (so you can change future activities if you decide to go a different direction). A byproduct of this feature is that you could just start a sequence with two Noticeboards (with a stop point in between) and then just "improvise" new activities throughout the lesson by adding them via Live Edit.

So there will be many new options for less linear structures in the near future. It's worth saying that the "Optional" tasks box allows you to be less linear if you want - you could always start a sequence with a range of optional tasks to choose from, then have a few structured tasks after this.

As for going back, any student can return to any previous task by double-clicking on the progress bar. Depending on how the given tool is set up, they may be able to continue to work on it (eg, an ongoing forum), or if it was just a "one shot" task (eg, a one-off Q&A), then they can see their past work, but not change it. In my view, the ability to change (or not) past activities should be a pedagogical decision depending on what you are trying to achieve with your students.

That's just a few quick thoughts for now - look forward to further discussion.

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Peter Miller

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When I started with LAMS, there were a number of emotions (enthusiasm, curiosity, anxiety) that led to sequences that were probably over-long, over-complex and excessively instructivist. I think the focus on "LAMS can't do X" may characterise that phase and sometimes obscures the pedagogic value of its support for "A-W". After all, it's distinctly possible that, with the "small things, loosely coupled" philosophy of Web 2.0, LAMS shouldn't try to do *everything*, just one thing very well. Incidentally, there are some great TED talks that promote the view that giving people more choice doesn't make them happier! See http://ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=b_schwartz and http://ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=d_gilbert. OK, maybe we're not here to make students happy (a topic for the Lounge maybe)? Still, perhaps we should be aiming for a kind of zen-like simplicity that places students in some kind of "zone" for optimal learning and then leaves them to get on with it.

Posted by Peter Miller

By: James Dalziel

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Thanks Peter. Yes, I think the range of possible things you can do in LAMS is quite broad with a bit of creative thinking, but that doesn't mean it is the ideal tool for everything. The example of a lecturer who just wants to give students a range of information and let them work out what to do themselves is not especially suited to LAMS (at the moment) - LAMS assumes a lecturer wishes to provide at least some level of direction to students about what to do and when, that's the point of creating a sequence. I agree that some styles of university education may not be suited to this, but I also think many university students would benefit from more scaffolding of the tasks we give them....

What should LAMS try to do very well? I'd love to hear the thoughts of others in the community on this.

One thing I would like to see LAMS do very well is model a wide range of educational activity structures (aka lesson plans in K-12). Ultimately, I want to see just how far we can get with LAMS in describing (and running) *any* pattern of activities that makes sense educationally. This goal is similar to the idea of a pedagogical meta-model in Learning Design theory, but for me, it is essential that the software can *run* the structure, not merely represent it.

LAMS can model and run some activity structures already, we'll be able to do more with the V2.1 features mentioned above, and there are some harder nuts yet to crack.

One of these harder nuts was alluded to by Ian in his original post - the ability to have students "loop back" to earlier activities and work more on previous task(s). An important category of activity structures relies on the concept of returning to past activities and working on them again, so how could an ideal LAMS address this educational requirement of "looping"? A simple current option is to have a Noticeboard that just tells students to double click on the relevant earlier activity in the progress bar (eg, forum) and continue discussion (perhaps with some new direction). Another option is to have a special kind of tool which automatically "loads" a previous tool - this way an author can have a task which is towards the end of a sequence which loads, say, an earlier forum for further discussion. But would this work when you want to return to a set of earlier tasks (Fiona's "mini-sequence")?

Most people who want this structure assume you could show looping visually in LAMS authoring, and this visual representation might be quite easy (just draw a dotted loop line back to an earlier activity in the sequence and presto - "looping"). But there are lots of tricky problems in actually *running* this (ie, making looping actionable, not merely representational), such as the system knowing when to allow a learner to "leave" the loop and continue on (and where to continue from?); and how to represent loops in the learner progress bar. Related to this is a very difficult issue about what constitutes "task completion" when people return to activities many times - this is a challenge that has come up in our work on RAMS (for more on this, see this post from Scott Wilson, especially slides 9/10)
http://www.cetis.ac.uk/members/scott/blogview?entry=20070118151100

But my point is this - despite the challenges, I think LAMS should *try* to represent and implement a structure like looping because it's a pretty fundamental way of "doing" education.

I wonder what other fundamental structures are missing.....

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Peter Miller

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On reflection, the Web 2.0 reference is probably inappropriate as K-12 teachers/students may not have unfettered access to the Internet. And, obviously, user feedback is important so I shouldn't try to stymie it. However, I do think LAMS (as a project) should have aspirations beyond being the best workflow engine as a focus on workflow might be seen to favour teaching over learning -- though the two aren't entirely unrelated! (Not sure I'm entirely happy with these comments either so I'll stop drivelling at this point).

Posted by Peter Miller

By: James Dalziel

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But I think there is something in what you are saying Peter - the whole concept of Learning Design assumes the teacher has planned some student activities based on the teacher's knowledge of what content and activities can help students to learn. This starting concept can lead to very didactic/teacher-centred education, or to collaborative /student-centred learning depending on the way the sequence is constructed - you can build very rigid and very open sequences in LAMS depending on the choice and placement of different activity tools.

Personally, I don't think Learning Design is contrary to student-centred learning, but it does require teachers to think through a set of activities that is student-centred while at the same time providing some level of direction about what to do and when - and it can be tricky to get the right mix of student-centred and teacher directed/planned.

But even the very concept of *any* teacher-directed activities sounds "pre-Web 2.0", despite the fact that the "direction" might be to give students wide freedom in what they do and how.

So I think these ideas need more exploration and debate. I hope that future LAMS features like "floating activities" will help to discourage too much teacher direction when this is unhelpful to a particular pedagogical objective.

Having said all this, I'd really welcome suggestions on how LAMS could be extended to support more Web 2.0 concepts.

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Peter Miller

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I don't have a good answer to this. The fact that many Web 2.0 services are subscription-only, password-protected and run a closed group management system (if any) makes any form of tight integration problematic. However, it might be useful (if only symbolically) to enable students to add blocks to the sequence that record activity on Web 2.0 sites and to see such annotation reflected in their lefthand navpanel and the teacher's monitor.

Posted by Peter Miller

By: James Dalziel

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Sorry for the long posts, but I also wanted to comment on lecturers giving students a set of tasks and letting them choose how to do them.

This requirement isn't the main feature of LAMS, so although you can try to do it with Optional activity boxes, it may be simplest to use a traditional LMS for this kind of task.

But in my personal vision of the ideal future learning platform, I imagine a system which can have a suite of activity tools that can be sequenced (ie, LAMS style) or non-sequenced (ie, traditional LMS course page). In addition, the tools can be teacher/lecturer controlled or student controlled. In this vision, Ian's lecturer might create a non-sequenced set of tasks for students to complete; or alternatively, the lecturer might describe an end goal (a group report on X) and perhaps some starting materials (articles), and then let student groups choose how they want to collaborate to achieve the specified goal. Students could then choose a number of options - do everything face to face in the coffee shop; use tools outside the learning platform that suit them (eg, MySpace); or use the suite of learning platform activity tools in a "student controlled" area where students choose how to use them, who can use them (eg, only their group), whether they want to sequence any tasks for the student group to work through (using a student controlled LAMS area), etc.

For me, there are two essential features to this "student controlled" area that set it apart from current LMS concepts:

First, the tools in this area are student controlled - students decide which tools to use, how to configure them, who has access, etc. Students can create as many workspaces and tools as they choose. Most importantly, teachers do not have access to any of this unless the students explicitly invite them to participate - it really is a "student controlled" area.

Second, I'd like to see the tools in this area provide a feature equivalent to LAMS V2 "portfolio export", that is, any student can easily export and keep their own personal record of the activities they were involved in within the "student-controlled" area. This feature could provide a genuine educational "value add" over general web collaboration tools like MySpace.

Some of this converges with recent thinking about Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). As much as I'd like to see these features in LAMS, I think we'll be flat out for some time just achieving the requirement described in the previous post (modeling and implementing educational activity structures), and with any luck, other developments in e-learning may provide this functionality anyway.

For the record, these ideas build on previous discussions of the LAMS Tools Contract "Cube" - see comments on this in a newsletter a year ago:
http://www.lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/educationalcommunity/forums/message-view?message_id=179203
and also see the attached rough Powerpoint slides about the Cube from around the same time.

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Robyn Philip

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I think one of the key issues underpinning this debate is the mental model that teachers bring to the use of LAMS.

If you think of a LAMS’ sequence, as I did initially, as a tool for constructing a whole program of work, then its limitations and lack of flexibility in terms of moving back and forth are immediately evident. I tended to construct sequences that were too long and too complex. LAMS doesn’t work like WebCT, Moodle or Blackboard etc, and it wasn’t created to be like one of these systems. A single LAMS sequence is better for a discrete set of connected activities – as student-centred as the author wants to make them.

Once I began thinking about LAMS as a tool that I could use to link and enable smaller activities, I started to see where the system came into its own.

For example, in a face to face tutorial I am preparing, which combines LAMS activities and traditional in-class activities, I will at times be didactic and give students information and instructions (set up the learning context), then set them to freely undertake their own work, often co-creating original resources that will be shared in some way with the whole class. For some of these activities I will expect students to go back and revise their answers before sharing with others. Other times we will just move on, without re-editing, but using that previous work as a basis for reflection and further conceptual understanding. You can use LAMS to help facilitate this tutorial model online or in a blended setting. The trick is not to think that you can do everything in LAMS (version 1 or 2).

Being able to move around more freely in LAMS will be great, and branching will be a very useful feature. But I think that by conceiving of each LAMS’ sequence as a tool for smaller activities you get far more out of the system. The best way to understand this is to see student-centred, student driven examples in use.

Posted by Robyn Philip

By: James Dalziel

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Thanks Robyn - seeing LAMS as a "module" level planner, rather than a "course" level planner is a really important observation. (NB: By "planner" I mean "plan and run")

I wish we had a better word for "module" - that is, a discrete component of a subject/unit/course that might go for a class/lesson, or for a week over several classes/lessons (or online over a week or more for distance education), or a similar period of time suitable to the context (eg, a half day workshop in corporate training). Part of the difficulty is that different types of education (university, K-12, etc) think of this thing ("module") differently, and have different words to describe it as well as different scheduling patterns for classes (or their online equivalent).

For some educators, the defining characteristic of a module is that it addresses a particular learning objective (or outcome or competency). This works well in some contexts, but in others you are always addressing a range of learning objectives (eg, subject specific content for the module, as well as more generic skills like problems solving, communication skills, etc), which makes it difficult to make the module = learning objective link hard and fast. Personally this ideea doesn't work well for me, but I know it is important in many other contexts.

Another key element of focusing on modules (rather than whole courses) is the potential for sharing and re-use - my sense is that it is rare that an educator would replicate an entire course from another educator (if it were shared), but re-using a single module (or potentially a number of different modules shared by different educators) is more likely. This has always been one of the key drivers behind the way LAMS was designed.

Posted by James Dalziel