Forum LAMS Newsletter: Newsletter 5, 23rd Oct, 05

By: James Dalziel

[ Forward ]

Following successful integration of LAMS with Sakai (the leading US HE OSS LMS), and presentations of LAMS at the US EDUCAUSE conference which created great interest in LAMS (particularly among the Sakai community), Sakai and LAMS are pleased to make the following joint announcement:

Media Release, 24th October 2005, For Immediate Release

Sakai and LAMS integration released

Sakai, the world’s leading open source Collaboration and Learning Environment, and LAMS, the world’s leading open source Learning Design system, today announced successful integration between the systems. This integration allows teachers and professors to benefit from Sakai’s highly scalable learning platform combined with the unique “digital lesson planning” approach of LAMS.

“This is great news for the Sakai community”, said Dr Brad Wheeler, Associate Vice President and Dean of IT, Indiana University and Sakai Project Board Vice Chair. “Integrating LAMS with Sakai brings a rich new set of features for planning and delivering sequences of online learning activities,” he said. Professor Joseph Hardin, School of Information, University of Michigan and Sakai Project Board Chair, heartily agrees, saying “LAMS’ visual authoring environment will create new ways for faculty to imagine and implement innovative e-learning in conjunction with Sakai’s robust course management, collaboration, and research support functionality.”

The integration of Sakai and LAMS makes it easy for faculty to select existing LAMS “sequences”, or author new sequences, and add these to their course pages. Students then access sequences via a simple link on their course page. The integration achieves “single-sign-on” – once a teacher or student has logged into Sakai, no additional login is needed to access LAMS. For faculty, a LAMS sequence which is created in one course can be re-used or adapted for another course, or shared with colleagues anywhere.

“The combination of LAMS and Sakai presents a powerful new force for innovation in education” said Professor James Dalziel, leader of LAMS. “This integration takes the student experience of e-learning beyond traditional course pages, and into an era of rich online interaction and collaboration. For faculty, sharing and improving LAMS digital lesson plans represents the birth of ‘open source teaching’” he said.

Details of the integration are available from http://www.lamsfoundation.org/integration/sakai2/ including animations of the two systems in action and a registration page for access to a live demonstration server. Support for the integration of Sakai and LAMS was provided by Cambridge University, with the integration code being released under the OSI approved Educational Community License.

Going beyond this initial integration, Sakai and LAMS will explore closer tools integration so that in the future, for example, the Sakai Forum could function inside a LAMS sequence. "We are really excited about the technical aspects of the integration of LAMS into Sakai, and about enhancing the functionality of Sakai tools so they can richly interact with the LAMS workflow engine. We look forward to working more closely with LAMS, and visiting the LAMS team in Sydney, Australia in early 2006 to begin co-ordinating this work,” said Dr Charles Severance, Chief Architect of Sakai.

The Sakai software is a community source effort to develop a platform for innovation in collaboration, teaching and learning, and research support software. The project is led by the Sakai Foundation (see sakaiproject.org). LAMS development is led by the Macquarie University E-Learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE) in Sydney, Australia. LAMS is managed by the non-profit LAMS Foundation, with support services provided by LAMS International Pty Ltd. Both LAMS organisations are supported by Macquarie University.

Contacts: James Dalziel, LAMS, james@lamsfoundation.org & Joseph Hardin, Sakai, hardin@umich.edu

Posted by James Dalziel