Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Re: moodle/lams presentation on moodle congress in Vienna and some questions

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Ralf

Once again, thank you very much for sharing the integration at the Vienna congress. Really cool.

> There were some questions that I couldn't answer.
> One guy asked that he thought, you planned also to integrate
> moodle functions of the activities in lams.
> Are there such plans?

As James mentioned previously, it's possible but it requires some changes in the Moodle activities to fit the LAMS tools API. For instance, in LAMS a teacher can go to Monitor and view the progress of a particular student (see Activitiy Tab in Monitor). A teacher then can click on the activity for that student and view what that individual student has answered or viewed. Although Moodle has similar functionality, this interface (for each Moodle activity) would have to be create it to accommodate for this feature. This is only one example of modifications that will be required on Moodle tools to fit LAMS Tools API, but there are plenty others (Define in Monitor, groupings, etc).

However, it's not impossible

> What are the plans about the further development of
> activities in lams?

Indeed. You can have a look at LAMS in the Future presentation

> An other point was the technical aspects of the integration.
> Is LAMS a separate server and how is it connected to the moodle system?

Good question.

LAMS and Moodle are two separate applications.

Having said that though, it doesn't mean that you need two separate hardware servers to run them. As a matter of fact you can have them both in the same server even sharing the same web server (and sharing the same port).

In terms of how these applications are "connected", we use web services to exchange information between the two. In the LAMS&Moodle integration page, there's a document that explains in details the technical aspects of the data exchange between the two.

> Is there a solution with a one server installation including moodle and lams?

Yes, you can have them both running in the same physical server no problems. We will share a document on how to set this up shortly as we've done it before. Additionally, Clive Gould in the Moodle community also did it even before us and documented a bit the process.

> Is it possible to add lams to an existing moodle installation?

Yes, just like you would add a new tool in Moodle, you add LAMS. In all fairness, LAMS has a new Moodle PHP tool which acts as a connector to an external LAMS server.

.

> How is the lams course content included to the backup/restore concept of moodle?

At the moment, it is not at all. If you export a course that contains a LAMS sequence as an activity, neither the LAMS sequence or the contributions to that LAMS sequence from the learners will be export as part of the course backup.

In LAMS 1.1, it will be possible to export a sequence with all its content

Hope that helps, and again, thanks a lot for your presentation and questions

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione