Forum LAMS for Tech-Heads - General Forum: Re: Use of timers

By: James Dalziel

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You can also use Gates with the "Schedule" option to release new activities to students after a certain amount of time (say 5 minutes after one activity, then 5 minutes after the next activity - which would be 10 minutes in Schedule for the second Gate, as it counts from the start of the sequence, not from the last activity!).

If you do this, students will only be able to proceed to the next task after the time has elapsed for the Gate to open, and they then go to the Gate (which will have been removed and they can proceed).

However, there is nothing in this approach that "forces" students to end one task and then move to another. This would probably require a timer "inside" a given activity, and some new functionality about forcing completion (including things like "warning - 1 minutes to go").

This is a feature we've thought about for awhile, but haven't had a chance to implement yet. There are some challenges to sort out with this - is the time available to students in a task relative to the start of the sequence for everyone, or is it relative to the individual student - ie, if you want students to only have 10 minutes in a chat room, is that 10 minutes each (but all starting at different times as students enter the chat at different moments), or is it 10 minutes altogether, regardless of whether some students arrive to the chat "late"?

These complexities are not impossible to fix, but they make it more difficult to do this is a way that remains easy to use, and yet still achieves what different teachers may has in mind.

I expect that with the interest in the new Time Graph feature in Monitor, we'll be thinking more about this area to try to work out some solutions for the future. We'll also need to think about refinements for Time Graph related to this, and also related to period of "inactivity" within a task that can get counted in a Time Graph.

Hope this helps!

Posted by James Dalziel