Forum LAMS Lounge Forum: Re: What will happen to LAMS when new vesion of Moodle is released?

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Trevor,

This seems to be a common misconception about Moodle2 (and LAMS, I guess).

Moodle 2 will do things like conditioning but it doesn't quite do sequencing, branching, outputs, optionals, authoring and monitor, force completes, Groupings, stop points, interoperability, export portfolio, etc, that LAMS does.

Moodle 2 has the condition features that LAMS had back in 2002... and I mean this in the nicest possible way

People that state that Moodle2 is leaving LAMS obsolete, most likely haven't look at LAMS since 2002 because it does a whole lot more than just "show/hide this if the user get X or Y" conditioning.

As a matter of fact, we have had Moodle tools integrated within LAMS for almost half a year already. And these Moodle activities implement a lot more than just completion, so you can say for instance, if the user posted X number of words in the Moodle Forum, then send him to do this set of activities, or stop him and don't allow him to continue, or make them go back and do more, etc, etc. Also, you can use the nice drag and drop author and monitor to create very complex and elaborate learning sequences. Additionally, you can export them and share them with other people (yes, even if they are moodle activities!).

And the changes to do this for Moodle activities are not only very few, but they make them a lot more powerful than what Moodle 2 now does. But that's because they leverage on LAMS progress/sequencing engine.

By far, you gain a lot more by doing a LAMS Moodle integration than just with Moodle2 conditioning.

In short: yes, you are right... LAMS and Moodle can complement each other very very well.

What we try to do in LAMS is not copy Moodle (or any LMS), but provide it with all the good stuff that LAMS does. Therefore all the integrations we have and the new deeper integrations.

We want to keep focusing in what we do best: orchestrate learning activities that allow the teacher to teach better and the students to learn from eachother. And by no means, create -yet another, course management system... Moodle, Sakai, .LRN are already pretty good at it.

I hope that helps and clarify things a bit

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione