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

By: James Dalziel

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As Ernie has mentioned, there are lots of LAMS features related to sequencing that go beyond conditional activities, so even with the new features coming in Moodle 2, we think there are lots of benefits from using Moodle and LAMS together when you want a structured sequence of activities - or to put it in educational terms - when scaffolding of activities for student learning is important to achieving the desired educational outcomes. The visual nature of LAMS Authoring also has special benefits for teachers.

The LAMS team will continue to focus on our particular area of expertise around activity sequencing, rather than trying to add traditional LMS functionality to LAMS that already exists in many other systems. We'll continue to work on integrating LAMS with key LMSs including Moodle, and our new work on "deep tools integration" is an important next step for this work.

Related to this, Martin Dougiamas (leader of Moodle) and I catch up from time to time to share ideas about the future of e-learning, and we've always had alot of respect for each other's work. When we last spoke a few months ago, one of the main things we said we'd look at next was the requirements for deep tools integration as mentioned above, and Martin was keen to hear about our technical experience of doing this with Moodle to see what extensions might be needed to the APIs for Moodle tools. If this worked out well, Martin was interested to build these extensions into future Moodle releases in a way that would work not just for LAMS, but also for other similar sequencing approaches - so this would be good for Moodle/LAMS integration, but also good for integration with other sequencing systems.

For me, one of the most important next steps for LAMS is the Activity Planner, and in particular, developing libraries of good teaching ideas which can be easily used and adapted by educators. This is a quite new dimension to LAMS that is more educational than technical in focus, and we hope will break new ground for e-learning. For more information on the Planner, see
http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/planner/

Posted by James Dalziel