Forum Teaching with LAMS - experiences: Learning design and LAMS


 
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1: Learning design and LAMS
11/17/05 06:34 AM
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Hi all,
One of the areas our research group in Italy has been very active in over recent years is helping teachers to design learning activities that take place within technology enhanced learning environments, and providing the means for teachers to share their designs within a community of like-minded colleagues. In particular we've focused on key aspects of learning design like subject-area pedagogy, learning goals, context sensitivity and constraints, learner competencies, teacher mediation, etc. We're very interested in exploring the potential for integrating these areas within LAMS, which is very strong at the implementation and delivery end of the spectrum.

Rather than factoring out context-related elements in order to produce template shells that can be applied in the widest possible range of contexts, we'd be interested in enriching the descriptive information that can be provided in sequence designs (at both sequence and activity levels) as a useful support for teachers both in design and implementation phases. Ideally, this info would be accessible to teachers both upstream and at runtime, and within the LAMS system itself rather than in the external Template Advice file.
At the very least, this would mean allowing descriptors at sequence level in some way and perhaps adding fields under the current Activity Name/Description fields for each activity.
So two questions for you. Has anything like this been considered during development and do you think it would be do-able from a technical viewpoint?
We'd greatly appreciate your thoughts.
Ciao for now,
Jeff

Posted by Jeffrey Earp

2: Re: Learning design and LAMS
In response to 1 11/17/05 04:38 PM
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G'day Jeff,

LAMS 1.1 does allow teachers to use descriptive and instructions information about a sequence and individual activities within the sequence.

In LAMS 1.1, each individual activity of a sequence contains several intructions or descriptive fields. These fields are meant to be information for teachers on the purpose and meaning of each particular activity and also information on how to "run" this particular activity.

In practical terms, this work as follows:

When a teacher drag-and-drops an activity, and then double click on it, she will see a set of tabs at the top of the screen allow her to enter the content of that activity. That's very similar of what you do today with 1.0.x. However, in 1.1 there are two extra "areas": one, an advanced tab where specialized features for the activity are available, and two, an instructions tab where the teacher is able to add descriptive information (for the teachers only) about this particular activity.

In this instructions tab, the teacher can add files and/or descriptive info (in plain text or HTML) to provide the teachers that are running this sequence, information on the purpose and instructions about this activity in particular.

Moreover, LAMS 1.1 allows you to run activities in off-line mode. For instance, you might want to have an activity that tells the students to do something without need to use their computers (a lab experiment for instance). Therefore, the instruction tab provides two sections, instructions for an activity that is meant to be run online and instructions/descriptions to run this activity offline.

Again, these online and offline descriptions are *only* available for teachers thru the Authoring and Monitor interfaces.

Attached you can find a screenshot of the Multiple Choice activity tool for 1.1 and the instructions tab. At the top you can also see the other two tabs I was describing before. Note that this still in development, therefore it might change slightly though.

Regarding sequence-level description, just as we have now, 1.1 sequences will have a title, description, licensing info, etc.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

Ernie

Posted by Ernie Ghiglione

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