Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Re: Help needed with LAMS and semantics. All input welcome

By: James Dalziel

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This issue illustrates one of the important ways in which LAMS is different to a traditional LMS/VLE, as the concept of a sequence of activities that you work through is central to LAMS.

For me, I'd be happy to change the "Finish" text to "Next Activity" to try to make explicit that you are moving on to a different activity. For "within activity" progression buttons, I think "Continue" would be okay. I also like the idea of having a more striking visual appearance to the "Next Activity" button at the end of an activity to give an additional cue that you are moving to something else.

In terms of completing/finishing a whole sequence, I think we should handle this through the current "Finished" page that comes up. In theory we could try to get the last activity in a sequence to check if it is last, and then change its final button from "Next Activity" to "Finish", but I don't think this is essential (as the Progress bar would already provide an indication that this is the last task).

I think the reason we have used "Finished" is that in the past several LAMS activity tools allowed you to only do the activity once (eg, Q&A, Vote), so when you get to the end of the activity, you really are "Finished". However, now that we have LAMS V2, my view is that ideally this kind of feature should be an optional setting (in advanced) for all relevant tools, and then if you choose to only allow students to do the task once, then I think the activity tool code should then know to add a warning message within the relevant page text to say something like "NB: You cannot change your answer once you complete this activity".

In other words, for V2 we would assume tools allow you to come back and change them unless an author selects a "no change" option in Advanced, and then the activity tool itself will add a message to this effect into the page text.
(NB: This is a suggestion for the future, not a guaranteed current feature!).

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This discussion touches a deeper conceptual issue with group-based workflows where individuals return to tasks multiple times over a sequence (eg, ongoing debate in an early discussion forum even after doing later activities). While we support this in LAMS, it is challenging to know the best way to handle this conceptual problem, and this has come up in some of our recent RAMS discussions - if a sequence involves a sequence of tasks and regular "looping back" to an early ongoing discussion forum, how do you know when people *realy have finished* the discussion. I don't see any easy answer to this so far. For some further discussion of this, see a presentation on RAMS from Scott Wilson at http://www.slideshare.net/scottw/designing-systems-for-managing-dynamic-collaborative-research-processes/
especially slides 9 and 10.

Posted by James Dalziel