LAMS 2.2 Feature List
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New Features
| Feature | Description | Demo |
|---|---|---|
| Text-based Branching | Ability to create branching conditions based on text output from tools. This feature is supported by Forum, Survey, Q&A, Chat and Notebook. A teacher can set up a condition based on the text entered by a learner. For example, if the learner answered the question with the words "Good" and/or "OK" but not "Bad", then go this branch. | Chat Forum Q&A Survey Notebook |
| Learners select Grouping | Now the teacher can create groups and get the learners to choose the group they want to be part of | Groupings |
| Presence | Although LAMS has a lot of collaborative activities, as a learner, you really didn't know if there were other people doing a lesson at the same time as you. With the implementation of presence, learners are now able to see who else is doing the same lesson with them at the same time. In the near future, we will also implement group chat and instant messages between learners or teachers | Presence |
| Gates | In LAMS, gates are use to control the flow of learners (more info on Gates). Until now gates work on and all or nothing principal: the gate is open or close for everyone in the lesson. In LAMS 2.2, gates now work on an learner by learner basis. So a teacher can decide to open a gate for a few users only. Additionally, teachers can specify conditions to open gates on individual bases. For example if the learner has got a 8/10 in the exam, then open the gate for him, otherwise force him to retake the test. | Gates Documentation |
| Learning Objectives | in LAMS 2.2, teachers can add learning objectives to a sequence, but then also can map those learning objectives to specific activities. In that way they can document in which activities the learning objectives are achieved. Also teachers running these sequences can see in monitor the objectives for each activity and when exporting the portfolio, those learning objectives also are display for each activity that accomplish them. | Learning Objectives/Competences |
| Email Notifications | LAMS 2.2 has now email notifications. Which means that you can be notified of events when they occur. For instance you can notify all students when you add a lesson for them to do, or you can choose to get notified when learners submit assignments, survey entries, etc. | Coming soon |
| External tool wrappers | Now you can add tools to LAMS that aren't part of LAMS. They can live in an external learning management system and still work as if they would be normal LAMS tools! | More info |
New Activity tools
| Activity Tool Name | Tool Type | Description | Demo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wiki | New Tool! | Finally a teachers and learners can create documents in a collaborative fashion. The wiki tool creates a small scale set of linkable pages about a certain topic. | Documentation |
| Data collection | New Tool! | A very powerful tool for teachers as they can create databases for learners to add records to. Supports a lot of different types of data and has very cool ways to aggregate and present data to learners and teachers | Documentation |
| Google Maps | New Tool! | Very very cool tool to add a geospacial aspect to your sequences. For instance, you can ask your learners to point out where they live and then can construct collaborative maps using the powerful Google Maps API | Documentation |
| Online Spreadsheet | New Tool! | This tool is for creating spreadsheets online that the students can use to submit assignments and/or do calculations directly on their browsers | Documentation |
| Conferencing (Dimdim!) | New Tool! | Dimdim is an external tool that provides an awesome collaborative video and audio features, online whiteboard, desktop and presentation sharing. We have done an integration with their platform now, so if you are interested in synchronous collaboration, this tool has a lot to offer. Note that Dimdim is an external system and is not included as part of LAMS. | Documentation |
And a whole lot more...
There are hundreds of improvement, fixes and lot more features added in this release.
Enjoy!