Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 95, 15th Apr, 10

By: James Dalziel

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Asia Pacific LAMS conference - Keynotes & Registration

It's less than two months now to the 2011 Asia Pacific LAMS & Learning Design Conference on June 7th at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (LAMS training workshops on the 6th). The registration system is now available for online booking and payment, please go to:
https://order.lamsinternational.com/conference/register.do

I'm delighted to announce the Keynote speakers for the conference: Associate Professor Daniel Tan from NTU will speak on "Back to the Future of Learning: Reflections, Insight and Reality" and Dr Eva Dobozy from ECU will give a presentation on "Introducing the De Bono LAMS Sequence Series". Both talks should provide fascinating insights into the real world use of LAMS, including suggestions for future LAMS use. I'll also give a keynote at the end of the conference about recent LAMS developments. For more details on Keynotes, see
http://lams2011.lamsfoundation.org/keynotes.html


Moodle 2 LAMS integration update

We continue to enhance the integration of LAMS with Moodle 2. One of the latest ideas is that the LAMS sequence launch page in Moodle could (optionally) show an image of the sequence that Learners are about to enter - we can re-use the functionality from the "embed" feature to do this. I really like this idea, as it shares the power of the LAMS visualisation from Authoring with not just Teachers, but Learners as well. For discussion of this and other Moodle 2 integration issues - see:
http://lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/message-view?message_id=1144248


Mobile LAMS

We've been working on adapting LAMS for mobile learning environments - and we'll have exciting announcements about this at the LAMS Conference. But we've already released one of the important features to support mobile LAMS - a non-Flash Learner Interface. However, in the past Learners had to go to the Profile area to change this setting manualy, whereas now LAMS can detect when a Learner is on a mobile device and automatically switch to non-Flash mode - no effort required! For more details, see
http://lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/message-view?message_id=1254792


LAMS Scalability - more achievements

Ernie and the LAMS technical team continue to do great work on LAMS scalability. Two recent announcements on this are:

(1) 1000 users concurrently on a single server
We tested the response rates for a scenario of 1000 users on LAMS *at the same time* when using only a single LAMS server, and were able to get average responses under 1 second (0.6-0.8 sec). Personally, I've never actually seen 1000 LAMS users at one time - we rarely see more than a few hundred concurrent users even on big implementations of LAMS, as students tend to work on sequences at different times (unlike an LMS, where lots of students can be logged on together for large parts of a day). For details, see
http://lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/message-view?message_id=1256742

(2) Over 2000 users
We've pushed it even further with more than one LAMS server and got good results for over 2000 users at the same time - more details at:
http://lamscommunity.org/dotlrn/clubs/technicalcommunity/forums/message-view?message_id=1242629


LAMS Community Statistics

We've recently passed 800 sequences in the LAMS Community - my great thanks to everyone who takes the time to share their work, as it benefits the whole community.

Stats as of: April 14, 2011
Users: 6779
Number of Sequences: 827
Sequences downloaded: 14336 times
Sequences Previewed: 12348 times
Forum Postings: 6857
Translations to: 30 languages

Posted by James Dalziel