Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 25, 30th Apr, 06

By: James Dalziel

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LAMS Conference Website up

We now have a website up for the LAMS Conference in Sydney in December 2006. The website is:

http://lamsfoundation.org/lams2006/

Welcome drinks will be on the evening of December 6th. The main conference will run all day December 7th and the morning of December 8th. The afternoon of December 8th will offer optional beginners and advanced LAMS workshops.

For attendees who would like to give a presentation, please see the website for details. The deadline for submissions is 31st of July. More details about the conference will be added to the website over the coming months.

On a separate note, the conference website is the first example of a new "look and feel" that is planned for an upcoming revamp of the LAMS Foundation website - feedback welcome!

Moodle and LAMS project at UK Open University

The "JoinIn" project is a JISC-funded collaboration between the UK Open University and LAMS International to develop further integration between Moodle and LAMS, especially in the area of groupings.

To understand the focus of the project, consider this example. If you have a course of 200 students, there may be some LAMS sequences (eg, content, quiz, more content, second quiz) that can be run with the whole course as a single group. In this case, if you were using Moodle as your Course Management System (and LAMS for sequences), you would add a single link from the Moodle course page to the relevant LAMS sequence, and all students would do this as part of a single group.

However, for many other sequences (especially those involving discussion and collaboration), you may want to break the 200 students up into smaller groups (eg, 10 classes of 20 students each), and then run 10 parallel versions of the LAMS sequence - one for each group of 20. Ideally, you'd still have a single link on your course page, but in the background, the systems would ensure the different groups were set up automatically, and each student was sent to the right group. The JoinIn project will be working on grouping issues such as these, using Moodle and LAMS integration to illustrate how this works in practice.

One of the main people working on this project at the Open University is Alex Little, who has previously worked extensively on Learning Design, especially the development of "SLeD". Alex has just arrived in Sydney, Australia to work with the LAMS team over the coming weeks. Welcome Alex!

To learn more about Alex's work on JoinIn (and links to his other Learning Design work), see http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/a.little/index.cfm?page=JoinIn
NB: At this stage, JoinIn is fairly technical, but the end goal is some background magic that just "makes stuff work" that everyone can use in the area of flexible groupings!

WebCT and LAMS grouping integration

We've previously announced initial integration between WebCT and LAMS. Just a note to follow-on from the item above - we've recently developed similar grouping integration between WebCT and LAMS for use at Macquarie University. This is now complete and has gone live (I'm even planning to trial it in my own course in the coming month!). To see a live animation of the WebCT/LAMS groupings integration in action, see http://lamsfoundation.org/integration/webctce/groupings/

Posted by James Dalziel