In addition to the recent announcement of some initial integration work between Moodle and LAMS (this walkthrough is a good place to start to understand how the two systems can work together), Oxford University also announced as part of the Tools Integration Project that LAMS had been integrated with the open source Boddington VLE. While Boddington may not have the installed base of Moodle, both of these bode well for the continued uptake of LAMS and for continued practical demonstrations of what using a learning design tool in conjunction with a CMS/VLE as delivery environment might look like.

Anyone know of North American institutions experimenting with LAMS or something like it? Drop me a line, I would love to know (I promise I will sort commenting out on this blog in the not too distant future). – SWL

I found the lead to the LAMS website mentioned below in this useful recent report by Sandy Britain for the JISC. The report gives some background on the history and concepts of learning design, and then after laying out a new framework for evaluating learning design tools, provides an in-depth analysis of Coppercore, EduBox, Eduplone, LAMS, Lobster and Reload.

Significantly, though, Britain writes “As of the time of writing this report there are no tools available for end-users that support both the creation and running of an IMS Learning Design at any level.” Still, very useful for accurately portraying the current state of affairs in learning design tools. – SWL

You may have heard mention in a number of different forums of the LAMS system, developed by James Dalziel and Macquarie University. I’ve been hearing about it for a year now, but so far the most I had been able to find on this alleged learning design authoring tool was a paper or two. No website, no software.

Well things are looking a bit better – while I still can’t find access to a demo or extensive details on the software, this new site does give some background and a brochure, and at least provides a space to watch for its eventual wide release. I know folks in Australia and the U.K. have had more exposure to this tool so far, and any further details appreciated. – SWL

June Lester is a mathematician and an educator, and one of the people brave enough to help facilitate the ‘blogtalk’ we tried over the last few weeks. She’s posted a great piece on the frustration a ‘SME’ can feel in the so-called ‘course-development wars.’ She’s right of course – subject matter experts in education have also often taught the material before and understand quite well how to communicate it’s intricacies, and treating them solely as providers of content will almost certainly produce a lesser learning experience (as well as antagonize them.) …

But I stand by the point I was trying to make earlier – clarifying roles and formally adopting a process can and does help to avoid unproductive conflict.

Looking back over the Xplana article I was reminded about a thread last June on the ITFORUM mailing list concerning the difference between instructional designers and instructional technologists. At least some of that seemed at play in the conflicts described in the article – it sounded like some of the disagreements or criticisms were less about “theories of learning” and more about what size graphics to use on a web page.

Buried within that mailing list thread was a reference to a relevant sounding article, “A Taxonomy of Instructional Technology Service Positions in Higher Education” (available here for those with a subscription). – SWL

This piece by Susan Smith Nash on Xplana made me laugh. I wonder if anyone working in online instructional development in post-secondary *hasn’t* experienced this kind of situation…

Susan offers some very useful advice on how to address these issues. But I have to disagree slightly with one of her initial assertions: “We’re in uncharted territory when it comes to developing new approaches to e-courses, companion sites, online course templates, and facilitated e-learning.”

I know it *seems* like uncharted territory. but only if we consider developing e-learning courses to be unlike every other form of web-based development. There are no doubt differences. But I think there’s enough similarities to regular web development projects that many ID managers would benefit from some of the process thinking that has been evolving there over the past 10 years (and more if we just look at ‘development’ issues, and not just web ones.).

If you look at Susan’s list of recommendations, almost all of them are process-oriented, and many deal with making clear the definitions of roles. This was one thing that really bugged me about working in post-secondary institutions – the idea that every individual institution needed to invent it’s own set of processes ex nihilo, instead of learning lessons from the regular web development industry and software development in general. Sure, even in those other fields there is disagreement and a variety of competing approaches. But if you look at least, you’ll find lots of attempts to define process and roles that, with some modification by someone who understands the issues inherent to *instructional* materials/process, could greatly assist in smoothing over lots of these perennial ‘battles’ that seem to exist when they are not there.

To that end, here’s my 5 minute stab at an Amazon.com list of general web and software development books that could serve as a decent starting point for anyone wanting to adopt process instead of fighting battles. There’s lots more needed than just ‘process’ if you want to have harmonious and excellent development projects, but without it you are almost assured of continual ‘battles.’ – SWL

Via a post in James Farmer’s weblog comes reference to this interesting paper, originally presented by David Squires in 1999 to the International Conference on System Sciences. Anyone who has ever actively supported a CMS in an educational setting (or any software for that matter) will agree – one can simply never predict all of the uses that both instructors and students will find for software.

(As an aside – a recent favourite hack I heard of with WebCT was an instructor who was using the file upload/download capabilities to send audio messages to his students that he recorded on his desktop with a simple mic setup – instant voicemail system! Maybe obvious to you, but I hadn’t thought of it and the software’s not specifically designed with this in mind.)

This paper goes deeper than that, though, arguing for a design process that accomodates such ‘subversive use’ of the technologies. One thing I think is missing here, and often missed in the debates on the effects of media types on instruction is the fact that a distinct characteristic of web-based applications/content is the ability to record (and aggregate and ‘playback’) *how* the software/content is being used. Putting aside for a second the big-brotherish aspect, this seems to me to point at a new source of design data - a way for designers to see, after the fact, how their design intentions are interpreted/mis-interpreted, used/mis-used and to make changes accordingly. – SWL