Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Sequence storage LAMS V2 vs LAMS V1

By: Fiona Malikoff

[ Reply | Forward ]

Greg,

Just a quick answer - if it doesn't make sense say so and I'll try to post another answer tomorrow. We've been busy bees the last couple of days trying to get the Windows 2.0.2 installer ready.

The "Public" area has been replaced by the courses. If you have the authoring role in a course then when you are in authoring and you do save, you should see the course listed in your workspace tree. Open up the course and you should be able to save your sequence in the course folder.

In the attached screendump, I've expanded out the course MATH111. This screendump is taken on my PC so excuse the junk names - that is a developer's PC for you!

If you want to share sequences with the whole institution (school, university, etc) then you will need to create a general course to which all of the teachers will have access. You don't need to add any learners - just use the course as a "grouping" area for public designs. You could even call the course "Public" if you wanted to!

A handy tip - the folder "Lesson Sequence Folder" contains a copy of each design that is run for a lesson. When a lesson is created, we actually take a copy of the lesson and run based on the copy. This allows us to leave the original unlocked and you can continue to make changes to the sequence without affecting any running lessons.

But what if you accidentally delete your only original copy? (And don't laugh - we've already had one email from someone who had a colleague do this.) If you have run it as a lesson, then you can open the copy from the Lesson Sequence Folder. It will open as Read Only. You can then save it into your own area and start editing the new copy in your local area.

Fiona

Posted by Fiona Malikoff

By: James Dalziel

[ Reply | Forward ]

The key new feature here for LAMS V2 is as an author, you can now be part of multiple courses (rather than only 1 "intermediate" level between private and public, as was the case with LAMS V1), so you can share different sequences with different course teams.

However, maybe we need to add a "Public" folder back into the "MyGroups" area as a single location that is automatically available when you install a LAMS server (and all authors are part of this area). This would be available regardless of the courses you are in; and hence you still have a "whole of server" area for sharing, which is there by default for everyone (which would replicate the LAMS V1 "Public" area functionality). Not sure the implications of this technically - Fiona will need to comment on this - but we may need to have this feature put back into LAMS V2 if people are missing it from LAMS V1.

Ideally, it would be configurable in the sysadmin settings, with it turned on by default, but could be disabled by the sysadmin if desired (when you don't want a public sharing area , such as if you were hosting different organisations within a single version of LAMS).

Posted by James Dalziel

By: Fiona Malikoff

[ Reply | Forward ]

Technically an automatic "Public" area could be done. Whenever a new author or author admin is added LAMS, they would be automatically added to the Public area.

If you removed all authoring access for someone, the system administrator would probably need to remove the user manually from the Public area.

But what would people rather - an automatic Public area or more tools, more integrations, branching and then even more complex branching and sequencing, etc. That is, how important would this really be to people?

As the Technical Lead who looks down the list of bugs, improvements, enhancements, etc wondering where we get the hours from to do it all, I'll be asking folks to give LAMS 2.0 and the new course structure a go for a couple of months and see if you really really do need a Public area.

Changing habits can be hard!

You might want to ask yourself what you would really put in Public now. What if you were a high school and all your teachers put their designs that they want to share with the other teachers. Next year you decide to run a pilot scheme with your prefects, where they make up sequences for Peer Support groups they run (is it still called that these days?) So you give authoring access to the prefects. Now they can see stuff in Public too.

So the stuff in Public is not just accessible to anyone currently an author but potentially to anyone who may ever be an author on your LAMS installation.

Of course, you may have some wonderful designs that you want to share with the world if that was possible. There's always the LAMS Community for that. (grin)


Fiona

Posted by Fiona Malikoff

By: Ernie Ghiglione

[ Reply | Forward ]

The reason we had Public in LAMS1 is because we didn't have a course folder, so people needed an overall area to share sequences across what we used to called organizations.

Reintroducing a public folder I think will confuse people more than helping them because they would have to know what public means in terms of sharing with other people... let alone adding another level of technical complexity.

I see however a good thing to add a Public folder if say the University has standard sequences that need to be shared across all courses. But since there's a Author Admin role, they could add these to each course folder anyway. Additionally it's probably easier for the university to do this by sticking this sequences their website anyway.

Not to mention the nightmare in terms of permissions (who can read and write what for this public folder)

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Greg Jones

[ Reply | Forward ]

I appreciate Ernie's comments about prioritising development efforts. I think you guys have done a magnificent job.
Now that I have a better understanding of how the folder structure works I am happy to work with it. The suggestion of creating a 'default' course sounds like it will serve our purposes quite well. Thanks also to Fiona for clarifying about a copy of the sequence being used.

Just to expand on how good a job you guys have done with making LAMS 2 so intuitive. A couple of teachers asked me to set up accounts for them and create classes. Without any instruction apart from how to get into the author environment, they went away to have a play and came back with a completed sequence they will use soon. They also figured out a way of sharing resources using the chat tool.

Once again thanks for a great product and great help.

Greg Jones

Posted by Greg Jones

By: Greg Jones

[ Reply | Forward ]

Fiona,

Have just had a play on my laptop version and would like to just confirm a couple of things.

I created a new group called Staff Storage Area. This will act like the old 'public' area.

It looks like I do the following: Manage Groups | Add Users |Assign Roles.

Do staff only need Author roles for this group?

I was thinking of doing this using an Excel spreadsheet based on the roles template. I remember though that there is some caveat about this approach not being cumulative. We have about 80 teachers - is it safer to add the roles manually?

Maybe this is not the place for this question but here goes. I know that there are training courses available but they seem to be mainly on constructing sequences. I think I have a grasp of the basics of authoring. I look after LAMS in between my other duties and getting uninterrupted time to come to grips with LAMS is problematic. What I feel I need is e.g. a one day course combining some of the advanced authoring course and administering the system i.e. overall concept; user management etc.
Is such a course available? How much?

Greg

Posted by Greg Jones

By: Jun-Dir Liew

[ Reply | Forward ]

Hi, just chipping in about the roles spreadsheet...

> Do staff only need Author roles for this group?

Yep.

> I was thinking of doing this using an Excel spreadsheet based on the roles template. I remember though that there is some caveat about this approach not being cumulative. We have about 80 teachers - is it safer to add the roles manually?

Is the caveat you're referring to the same as the warning at the bottom of this page - http://wiki.lamsfoundation.org/display/lamsdocs/Import+Users - ? i.e. that the roles spreadsheet *sets* roles, it doesn't add them...? If so, it should be OK, since you're adding users to a new group, not overwriting their roles in an existing group.

Posted by Jun-Dir Liew