LAMS's 'Trojan Mouse Strategy': Ed-Media 2008 Conference update: Thursday

Report on ’Sharing Learning Designs: Lessons from the LAMS Community’, presented by James Dalziel, Macquarie University, Australia

I'll begin by noting that James’s presentation was not designed for an audience of ‘specialists’ or LAMS practitioners - many attendees were totally new to LAMS, or else use ED-MEDIA as their annual opportunity to glean news on the latest updates. James began by introducing LAMS, explaining that it is a toolset for adding structure / scaffolding to the learning process, and in particular, building a framework for educational activities "that a simple list of course resources on a [web] page [or LMS site] doesn’t have".

The main news on the LAMS development front is that a major new version of LAMS was released just a couple of weeks ago. It features greater branching (including group branching), more 'student-selectable' activities (a big plus, in my view), and better VLE integration (including Moodle and Sakai). Someone designing a learning activity in LAMS can use data from previous tools/activities to drive branching. Previously, this would focus on ‘high leverage’ data such as test scores, but this feature has become more sophisticated: and could now include, e.g., the number of forum postings a student has submitted. Everything in LAMS is still available as open-source software. The LAMS community remains a major resource and focus for development - James uses the phrase 'open source education', in relation to the community. He highlighted that LAMS users are truly an international group, and that LAMS is now translated into 25 languages. See: http://demo.lamscommunity.org

James’s presentation then took a more critical and reflective turn. The vision for LAMS is that it should 'change teaching as we know it', but he acknowledged that it is still 'early days'. The issue of the value of specific, ‘content-heavy’ learning sequences, as opposed to generic sequences, is very much a live one. In theory, designers and instructors gain the greatest value from generic sequences, but the lesson from practice is that educators "get fired [up] by discipline content". There is still not a lot of what might be termed “direct reuse” out there. James described this issue as "a significant debate that we need to explore, probably over the next decade." There are still issues around sharing: educators are reluctant to share things that aren’t “perfect”, and some may see community ratings through the lens of peer review—and find them a poor substitute for established academic practice. James questioned whether this might be a generational/IT experience issue, or a cultural frame of reference issue. I think he’s absolutely spot on there—surely it’s both.

I think many of the challenges for LAMS are far from new, and as I listened to James’s presentation I realised that many of them are all too familiar from a related sphere of work, digital repositories and learning objects. Creating the right e-learning tools/support ‘mix’; teacher motivation and rewards; lack of evidence for educational benefits; IP concerns around sharing. We’ve heard all of these before and, undoubtedly, they are still major barriers. But there are others, perhaps even more deeply entwined with educational practices and processes.

Educators in large institutions, such as universities, generally have to go through formal course approval processes that, in many cases, do not support learner-centred design processes. Many aspects of these institutional processes are entirely external to LAMS, yet they can seriously limit its impact. That’s one problem. Here’s another: can LAMS ever really aspire to introduce time-poor educators to pedagogic practices that are unfamiliar/alien to their discipline? And is this really what it should aspire to? Finally, I’m still not entirely convinced about highly formalised approaches to learning design. So much of LAMS is focused on making educational knowledge and practice explicit, when it is usually implicit—‘tacit’, to use Polanyi’s term. Judging from today’s presentation, the ideology or philosophy of 'learner centred' education remains the dominant educational paradigm for the LAMS community, yet this points to an enduring tension with LAMS's overall approach to learning design; which is highly 'instructional', structured, and LMS-friendly.

The next avenue for LAMS is to explore higher-level design processes and pedagogic planning (moving onto similar terrain to Oxford’s Phoebe project and the London Knowledge Lab pedagogical planner project, which Diana Laurillard is involved with). In a nice analogy, James describes this as the “Trojan mouse strategy'”. Pedagogic planning is certainly a hot area right now, and the UK will shortly see a slew of related projects starting up, with support from the recent two JISC calls on curriculum design. In LAMS, this planning tool will exist as a new layer on top of LAMS that will provide good practice templates, advice on choosing and editing, and simplifed authoring (NB: under development—currently “Vapourware” - but the LAMS team is building it, and it will exist “soon”). Keep an eye on the LAMS community for further developments.