SUNY has a home-grown Lotus-Notes-based learning management system that has some truly remarkable features. I’ll be posting about some of these innovations over the coming weeks as I get to know the system better. What I want to focus on in this post, though, is a feature that I have only ever heard of one other LMS providing in a meaningful way, which is providing a fundamental course organization structure (i.e., a user interface to the course) that focuses on the temporal sequence of learning activities rather than the more typical interface that simply organizes the course based on types of functionality and content resources (e.g., course notes, discussions, etc.). In previous posts, I have referred to this idea in terms of learning experience objects, but the folks at Macquarie University in Australia have built a system based on the same principles that they call a Learning Activity Management System (LAMS).The advantage of a LAMS over a conventional LMS is that it switches the emphasis from the content being served up to the learning process itself. Properly designed, it gives both the students and the professors scaffolding upon which they build a meaningful and productive learning experience–which, after all, is what a course is supposed to be.
Macquarie’s system (now managed by a separate non-profit organization) appears to take a fairly heavyweight and immersive approach, providing a thick client with a flowchart canvas and drag-and-drop activities. (I don’t have any hands-on experience with the product, so I’m going on what I’ve read about it on the web site and in a few email exchanges with one of the project contributors.) While SUNY’s system also has a thick client option (a topic I will delve into in a subsequent post), the have a more fluid, lightweight approach. Basically, the professors create modules which are flexibly defined but are typically one- to two-week course units. Within those modules, they can place a variety of links–to content, to a discussion board dedicated to the module topic, and so on.
To my mind, this is a major step forward in LMS design. I don’t have an opinion yet on the lightweight versus heavyweight approach; there may be room for both. Regardless, I think a course environment system that maps out the pedagogical journey in a way that is constantly visible to students and teachers alike is much more natural than the current generic groupware clones that we see in most LMS’s. It will be interesting to see how all of this evolves.
