Thanks for all the great suggestions Daniel - there are many good ideas in there, and I also share your interest in using LAMS for teaching research methods.
As with all open source development, the challenge for us is prioritising feature development according to a complex mixture of how much demand there is for a feature, how easy it is to implement, and how the new feature affects the rest of the user experience. We are always open to others helping with development (or funding specific development by us for them), but in the absence of either, here are some of my thoughts on the key ideas (for me) in your post:
- I'd really like to see LAMS cope better with less linear pedagogical approaches, such as those that are more like a spiral, in that you go back to previous tasks and build on them further. This isn't too hard with "single learner" activities, but is complex with groups due to group co-ordination issues. But a simple step in this direction would be a kind of "Tool Reload" option - this would reload content from an earlier tool, and then allow for new instructions/setting for further development, etc. Use of this feature could approximate quite alot of spiral style pedagogies (although they'd still look linear in LAMS Authoring). Some of your suggestions are quite similar, and this idea is certainly high on my list for 2010.
- Email messaging about new student work is a good idea, and for me, is part of a wider feature set that could also include indicators of new work in any tool both for learners and teachers (I sometimes imagine a star next to past activities being added on the Learner progress bar for when new content has been added to an activity that the learner has completed in the past. From discussion with Ernie, it seems that these kinds of features would be alot of work, as they would need implementing across all of LAMS, and quite alot of work in each tool - so they are definitely a good idea, but may not be easy to do until there is considerable funding or developer time available.
- Your activity group idea might be solved by the Optional Activity (rather than Optional Sequence) feature (available in the same place as Optional Sequence. If this isn't quite what you mean, it might help for you to look at Optional Activity and then tell us what else if would need for you.
I'll leave some of the other comments to Ernie - again, all sound useful, but we have such a long list of other ideas, I'm not sure whether any of this can be done in the short-medium term (on current resources).
Posted by James Dalziel
