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

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