I agree with Spyros that community tools are essential for a virtual environment. Students do need an impression of "being there" (but they ought to be given the option to remain invisible).
At some point there ought to be a discussion whether LAMS is meant to be a tool for short term activities (1-2 hours) that run within an LMS or whether it would support longer activities in which case various awareness tools (who is here, who is doing what, etc.) do become crucial.
I don't agree for SCORM (since adding a fully compatible player will cost). LAMS is interesting, because it is *not* SCORM. IMHO, Moodle lost its appeal because they invested in supporting IMS CP formats instead of improving their learner tools (horrible wiki, no document system, etc.). Also SCORM 1.2 is an awful kludge made by/for people who can't program. Real programmers ought to be able to implement standards like simple sequencing (but that would be in contraction with the LAMS sequencing tools). Anyhow to sum it up: Scorm may be expensive to implement and more importantly if LAMS goes towards ADL/IMS standards it will loose its appeal and become tied up in implementing all sorts of other boring standards (you could add quizzing, student records and lots of others ...).
I vote that LAMS ought to invest into supporting various project-oriented learning scenarios. That implies: more and better learner tools, loops in the sequencing (!), better feedback and monitoring tools for the teachers, access to persistent knowledge databases, etc.
The noticeboard would be a good idea (we both don't mean the HTML tool that already exists), but indeed something that would display information each time students comes back. It might integrate the calendar.
I already complained about "My Groups" :) Very confusing indeed to use "groups" in sequencing and also for talking about organisation of classes and courses. Actually I promised Ernie to help with localization in the future. One of the most important issues I identified is the need for terminology management, i.e. some sort of common grounding of essential terms through a multi-lingual thesaurus.
Being able to export/import data is also an interesting idea, since there are needs for processing that can not be implemented within LAMS at reasonable cost. (maybe there are other data than the surveys, e.g. the data collector). In the same spirit one could think about data views available in other tools. E.g. be able to include survey data in the wiki....
- cheers !
Posted by Daniel Schneider
