8.1 Learning design and open source teaching  (Page 7/18)

(3) Following from (2), Learning Design systems (such as LAMS) have not tried to add all the traditional CMS features to their core “workflow” features, and so if an instructor wants all the helpful “e-admin” features (and this includes me when I teach!), they aren’t available in a Learning Design system. This means that two systems will be needed (CMS + Learning Design) and in many cases, technical restrictions make this difficult or impossible. (As an aside, it is amazing to me how many of the real decisions about e-learning technology use in educational organisations are made by technical staff, rather than instructors; and when there is a disagreement between these groups, the instructors rarely get what they want). However I should note that since we released integrations of LAMS with Moodle, Sakai, .LRN, Blackboard and WebCT, we have seen increased interest in using LAMS within these CMSs.

(4) From a different perspective, I think early Learning Design systems have had some important limitations that made them seem too rigid for some instructors. For example, ever since we started building LAMS, colleagues have been asking for a feature that would allow them to change a “running” sequence “mid-stream”. The idea is that as an instructor, even when you plan a set of activities ahead of time, you often find yourself changing these halfway through due to new realisations you’ve had along the way (”oh - that next activity is not going to work, I should do something different”) or simply that the discussion among students within the sequence has taken a different direction to what you expected, and so you want to change the later activities to better reflect the unexpected direction of the discussion. As a teacher myself, I’ve always wanted this feature too, as it is pretty fundamental to the way education works in practice.

Unfortunately, Learning Design systems turn out to be very complex software applications (they are basically concurrent multi-actor workflow systems, which is bleeding-edge technology even for the most advanced workflow systems), and so the software requirements for editing a running sequence “on the fly” proved to be really hard. However, I’m pleased to say that after rebuilding LAMS from the ground up for the V2 release in December 2006, we were able to put a new architecture in place that would support “Live Edit” (as it is now called). This feature comes out in the LAMS 2.0.3 release due in the next few weeks, and if you want to see it in action now, it is available in the new “RAMS” beta release (RAMS is the eResearch workflow version of LAMS - see (External Link) ). For an animated walkthrough of this new feature, see (External Link)

Two other technically difficult but pedagogically important features to come soon in LAMS are “branching” and “floating activities”. Branching allows an instructor to have multiple pathways for different groups of students (and these pathways can be based on instructor or student choice, or automated - such as using a quiz score to determine which path a student follows). Floating activities are activities that are not “inside” the flow of the sequence - they’re individual activities that sit “along side” the main flow of tasks, and can be accessed by students at any time while in the sequence (this is useful for support information/tasks which not all student may need to do as part of the main flow, but are there as a backup for this who need them). Both of these features are due for release in LAMS V2.1 in July. My point here is that until very recently, some important pedagogical features were missing from a Learning Design system like LAMS, so for some instructors, these missing features may have had a big impact on their readiness to consider a Learning Design approach.