Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Online Instructions File

The Instructions tab in tools in Authoring are essentially instructions that you would add for teacher that are meant to run these activities.

These instructions are not instructions for students but to teachers/tutors instead.

As you know, in LAMS you can export a sequence you create and share it with other teachers so they can use it in their own teaching. So if these teachers need help on how to run a particular activity, then you can use the Instructions tab to add this information (BTW, this information is also available once they lesson is running in the Monitor interface for this tool).

Now, for instruction files, you can add any type of files. For instance if the activity requires the teacher to manually distribute a flyer to all students, the file or pdf with the flyer can be uploaded as online/offline instruction file.

I hope this clarifies this.

Thanks

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

My question arose when I was viewing your demo for Pixlr:
http://www.lamscommunity.org/lamscentral/sequence?seq_id=655088

I saw instructions at the top of the screen and didn't understand where they came from. I now see that this is a Shared Resources activity, and that, apparently, that type of activity is unique WRT having a way to show sequential instructions.

I had not yet explored Shared Resources, but will now...looks very powerful.

Here are some comments/suggestions:

1. The term "Instructions" is used in very different ways in LAMS (like "Groups", as we discussed previously). My suggestion is to revise your naming of things called "Instructions", so that they are unambiguous. For example, the thing that I saw could be called "Shared Resource Instruction", to distinguish it from "Activity Instruction".

2. I didn't initially realize that I was looking at a Shared Resource activity, because the icon is the same as Image Gallery. IMO, icons should be unique for each activity type.

Cheers!

Posted by Jonathan Maybaum

You are correct in both account. We must review the semantics we use in LAMS and how we call key concepts, like Groups, Grouping, Instructions, Student/Learner, Monitor/Tutor, etc.

Just so we don't forget about this, I have created a development task:

http://bugs.lamsfoundation.org/browse/LDEV-3002

Note that I added something there that I think will be helpful:

"We need to have a good thought about them [our semantics] and discuss them with the community to ensure that these terms are as accurate as they can be.

If we aren't able to reach a general consensus -which could be possible because LAMS is used in different learning environments, then a technical way to make change these words manually will be a good solution. For instance, in the sysadmin section, the sysadmin user can change the word "Learner" to "Student" and that change will apply to all these terms within LAMS. So essentially, an interface to modify these words/labels."

Thanks

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione