Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Re: Can multiple Forum activities share the same Forum?

By: James Dalziel

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As Fiona mentions, you can leave a past Forum open (ie, not "Locked when finished"), and then direct people back to this with a later Noticeboard (in which case, Learners double click on the earlier Forum to open it in a new window).

The feature I would like to have one day is a kind of "Load Previous Tool" feature - which would allow you to insert a special kind of tool into the sequence in the place where the Noticeboard would go (in the above example), and this feature could be set to load a previous tool at this point in a sequence (so long as its not locked).

Ernie and I have discussed this from time to time, and would like to do it, but there are some challenges to sort out. For example:
- If you wanted to provide new instructions ("Now discuss how your views have changed to before...") how/where would you do this?
- When you reload the tool - do you make a complete copy of the earlier tool (including student comments) and start from this? Or do you "use" the earlier tool twice?
- What constitutes "task completion" for the later version of the tool (ie, you've already clicked "Finished" the first time, so what do you do here? Task completion is important so that LAMS knows to present the next activity to you).

I don't think these are insurmountable, but they need a bit of careful thought - would welcome any feedback on this.

From a pedagogical point of view, teachers often create a set of activities that involved returning to prior tasks for further discussion/reflection - so our current failure to capture this dimension of teaching in LAMS Authoring is a significant gap (in terms of a comprehensive "meta-model" of pedagogical structures).

Posted by James Dalziel