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

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

Posted by Peter Miller

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

Posted by Peter Miller

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

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

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