Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Sequences depending on custom variable's value

LAMS does allow you to control learning paths according to outputs of previous activities, groups, student selection or teacher selection.

If you want to use an external algorithm you could however, you will need to modify the code to do so.

We were working in a research project called Flexo funded by the Spanish government to create an implementation that will make LAMS take external variables to do branching but unfortunately the project had to be scaled down.

IMS Learning Design is all good in theory but in practice it has shown to be very difficult to implement. LAMS has taken the best part of it and try to do an implementation that will work for teachers without having to heavily modify XML files at runtime. So I don't think we will see LAMS to be fully IMS LD compatible in the near future though. My personal believe is that IMS LD needs to be reassessed and reviewed taking into account the work that it's been done on it but I don't think there are many participants that are willing to do so.

Here are the minutes of the latest IMS Global meeting on IMS Learning design:

http://is.gd/csrt4

There's a very different understanding of what IMS LD is and what it is meant to do or be used for.

But, back to your questions: yes, you could use external variables to do branching in LAMS. But you will need to get down to coding to do so at the moment. Hopefully in the future we can have a nice API to import external variables to do conditioning.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

thank you very much for your reply!

please tell me if i can make sequences depending on results of moodle's activities? and when do you plan to make SCORM tool in LAMS?

Alex.

Posted by Alex Lifanov

Yes, see the Moodle Forum activity example.

> and when do you plan to make SCORM tool in LAMS?

I was planning to have SCORM tool for 2.4 but unfortunately that is not going to happen

It will be easier if we could find an java based open source implementation of SCORM 1.2. But otherwise, if we need to build it from scratch it will take quite a bit of time and resources that we don't have at the moment.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

As i see in your roadmap, there are plans to make scorm player in LAMS 2.4, please tell me when will it approximately be released or when will it be accessible to compile from source?

By the way, i saw "Tools inputs and outputs (ability for tools to communicate and exchange data)" in LAMS 2.4 roadmap. Can you tell a few word about it?

Sincerely,
Alexander

Posted by Alex Lifanov

Yeah, this is actually something really really cool that is mainly done but we need to work on the Authoring interface to make this easier for people to use.

Essentially you will be able to get output from one activity and use them as inputs in another one. Typical example could be:

First activity is a Q&A where you ask the students "What's your favorite joke?". The students enter text on the answer

Second activity is Vote where you take all the students' inputs in the previous Q&A and present them as options in the vote so the students can choose the funniest joke.

(I know, I know, perhaps not the most pedagogically advance example, but at least it's entertaining).

So you take the answers/inputs from an activity and re-use them in the next one.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

Posted by Alex Lifanov