Hi everyone,
Over a year ago we integrated LAMS into .LRN, so within a .LRN Community/Class you could add LAMS lesson directly to your course page (see documentation).
But over the last month, we've been exploring the option of adding .LRN Tools into LAMS and making them behave as native LAMS tools [1]. That means, they would be workflow aware (run within a sequence of activities), group aware (in case you use LAMS Groups), course independent (a sequence can run with many courses), interoperable (export and import them into other LAMS-.LRN servers).
And I'm happy to say that we have managed to accomplished all of the above and more in about two weeks.
We started looking at the .LRN Forum[2] and created a LAMS Tool Adapter (think of wrapper for the .LRN Forum) to add it into LAMS. And then identify the necessary interfaces to create the features that we wanted.
Now you can use the LAMS Authoring environment to create instances of .LRN Forum for a LAMS sequence and then use this sequence in as many .LRN Courses as you like.
You can also use LAMS groups and although the .LRN Forum tool might not have any concept of groups, the Tool Adapter takes care of it by creating as many instances of the .LRN Forum as groups are needed.
With the introduction of Branching in LAMS 2.1, you can use output from activities within a sequence to send students to different branches of activities. So within no more than 30 lines of code, we managed to get .LRN Forum to give us outputs that the LAMS sequencing engine can use to determine where to send a student based on his/her performance on the .LRN Forum. The two outputs we implemented are Number of words in all postings and Number of posting in the forum. So effectively a teacher can determine to which branch he/she wants the students to go if for instance the student posted more than X number of words.
Moreover, once you created sequences that contain .LRN Forum activities in them, you can export these sequences and the content for the .LRN Forum will also be exported within the sequence. So if you want to send this to another LAMS-.LRN Teacher or you are moving to another university, you can take all your sequences with you and import them back again and expect the exact same content and features from .LRN Forum. This actually achieves true tools interoperability, which is very very cool.
We've done this by creating the Tool Adapter I mentioned before and with slight extensions to .LRN Forum. I was particularly careful not to modify *any* .LRN Forum code but rather extending it instead so native .LRN Forum instances wouldn't be afected.
Here are the animations on how this work. I would suggest you have a look at the animations first so you are aware of the possibilities that this gives you. Also, have a play with it yourself at this demo server (running .LRN 2.4).
All the information about this can be find in the .LRN Tool Adapter wiki page where you can find all the extensions we've done to .LRN Forum.
As usual, I'll be more than happy to contribute these .LRN Forum extensions to .LRN if you think this would be of interest.
Any comments or suggestions are very welcome.
Thanks,
Ernie
[1] This work is as part of a proposal for identifying a common interface for Learning Design services.
[2] An example basedo on conversations at Universidad Carlos II Madrid with Aberlardo Pardo, Luis de la Fuente and Derick Leony.
