Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: LAMS and Moodle made easy: cool new animations!

By: Ralf Hilgenstock

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Hi Ernie,
this are fantastic tutorials. Easy to understand. Thank you.
Ralf

Posted by Ralf Hilgenstock

By: Adam Taylor

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Ernie

Fantastic work.
Just seeing Wink at work gives us another tool in our Learning Design.

I upgraded from Moodle 1.5.2 to 1.6(dev) expecting to see the LAMS integration available. Of course it is not, then I notice on your Integration page that you plan to put it in the Moodle CVS when testing is over.

We are REALLY keen to get going. LAMS and Moodle integration is the perfect match of flexible and seqenced online learning that we have been looking for - and we have done a lot of exploring through the OSI alternatives for a couple of years now.

Your work will revolutionise what resource-poor high schools can offer.

Well done and thank you and ... what's the timeline??!

regards

Adam Taylor

Posted by Adam Taylor

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Adam,

Thanks you for your comments. I'll pass them to all the development team.

We haven't committed our code to the Moodle CVS as yet. I have talked to Martin about this, but I guess he's very busy at the moment. Nevertheless, you won't be able to use the integration until LAMS 1.0.2 gets officially released (I'm hoping this will be next week).

The 1.0.2 release has all the "hooks" for the integration. However, it does not have an interface in the admins section to include the keys and authentication to the Moodle server. Therefore you need to get and do some manual entries in the DB (very simple ones anyway, we'll release the instructions when we launch 1.0.2)

Regarding Moodle, you won't need 1.6 to run LAMS, I believe any 1.5.2 version will do the trick just fine (at least that's the one we've been using. However, I think the "official" addition of LAMS to Moodle will be in Moodle 1.6. And that will give us some time to improve the usability, and tweak some bits.

At any rate, as soon as we release 1.0.2 and fix a few usability issues on the LAMS (Moodle) PHP package, we'll be releasing it for people to test it.

Thanks,

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Adam Taylor

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Hi Ernie

Yes - that makes sense and I understand better now where things are up to. Thanks.

BTW, I have seen lots of comments in the forums about the relative difficulty of schools installing Moodle/LAMS apps, including the possibility of installing on the same server. We run both on a moderately fast WIMP server - no probs. LAMS installation was completely painless. Moodle is too, for that matter. I think the sticking point for people is getting the php/mysql setup organised, NOT the latter two apps.

regards

Adam Taylor

Posted by Adam Taylor

By: Dean Shankle

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First, the wink tutorials are great. I presently use captivate and if anyone has experience with both I would appreciate any thoughts or comparisons.

Second, I encouraged LAMS as a "moodle module" during the Learning Design book study. It seems to be living up to what I hoped to be its potential. I showed some of this site to one of my clients and they were very excited about the possibilities.

Third, because of the above, I look forward to this rolling out. When do you realistically think that it will be usable in "the real world"?

Fourth, some of the changes that have already been made through this process have improved its usability. I am very thankful to all of the participants who are making suggestions that are leading to these improvements.

Posted by Dean Shankle

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Hi Dean,

> I presently use captivate and if anyone has experience with
> both I would appreciate any thoughts or comparisons.

I haven't really used Captive but have seen what you can do with it and it's more advanced than what you can do with Wink.

For instance, with Captive you can add audio to your flash movies. In Wink, you can't (yet?).

However, one of the things that have surprised me the most in Wink is its simplicity.

It's just *very* simple and intuitive to use. Within 10 minutes you have a pretty good idea how it works.

> When do you realistically think that it will be usable in
> "the real world"?

Well, you'll be able to use the integration once we release LAMS 1.0.2 (which probably be at the end of this month -yeah, we are having some problems packaging it for Windows ). Once LAMS 1.0.2 is out there and we are confident that our LAMS-Moodle PHP module is stable (that'll be from the input of the Moodlers), then we'll release it for people to use. I'm pretty confident this would take another two to three weeks. (Now, that doesn't include translation of the LAMS-Moodle module to other languages!).

Now, I would suggest to be cautious on how you roll this out. It's probably best to start slowly and see potential limitations. Not very concern with technical issues, but on how new users will get familiar and take advantage of the LAMS implementation.

Officially, we haven't announced the LAMS-Moodle integration in the Moodle forums. We have leaked this slowly to some key people (most of them very experienced Moodle users) that were -to certain degree- involved since the beginning (e.g. LD book fellows). Reading from their initial commnents, you can see that it has been a bit of a switch in paradymn for them as well.

But hopefully, the animations and potentially their translation can make implementations run quickly. So I hope

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

By: Ernie Ghiglione

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Just a quick note to let you guys known that Ralf Hildgenstock, has been helping us out to translate the LAMS&Moodle animations to German

If anyone wants to help translating those to other languages, please let use know so we can send you the source wink files to do the editing. Any help on this would be really appreciate it!

Kudos to Ralf!

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione