What is LAMS? LAMS is a revolutionary new tool for designing, managing and delivering online collaborative learning activities. It provides teachers with a highly intuitive visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities. These activities can include a range of individual tasks, small group work and whole class activities based on both content and collaboration. LAMS can be used as a stand alone system or in combination with other learning management systems (LMS) such as Moodle, Sakai, .LRN, WebCT and BlackBoard. LAMS provides teachers with a visual authoring environment for creating, storing and re-using sequences of learning activities. Teachers drag and drop activities into the authoring interface and then join the activities together to produce a learning sequence. This workflow model is what principally distinguishes LAMS from other more content based LMS by providing teachers and learners with sequences of activities with a high level of interactivity and collaboration. LAMS has a wide range of tools designed to be used for a range of pedagogical approaches, by teachers and students with varying levels of technical expertise. The Resources page has links to lots of presentations, case studies and whitepapers about using LAMS. Click here to view a screencast of LAMS in action. The same screencast from the European mirror.

LAMS Fundamentals Video The recordings of LAMS in this video are from an earlier version (1.0)

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Why Would I use LAMS?

There are many key benefits on why using LAMS, here are just a few:

• LAMS provides a highly intuitive visual authoring environment for creating sequences of learning activities. Evaluation reports on the use of LAMS report that teachers find LAMS easy to use and that LAMS also helps them reflect more deeply on their teaching practice.
• Students love LAMS! Evaluation reports consistently note that students find LAMS and ICT very motivating
• LAMS fosters greater student engagement - in one evaluation, only 16% of students were willing to discuss ideas in the classroom, however, via the collaboration facility within LAMS, over 83% were willing to discuss their ideas.
• LAMS incorporates single learner content (such as Learning Objects) as well as collaborative tasks such as discussion, voting and debate.
• LAMS allows educators to capture, share and adapt digital lesson plans based on "best practice processes".
• LAMS provides rich, real-time student monitoring and tracking facilities.
• LAMS is integrated with Learning Management Systems such as Moodle, Sakai,.LRN, Blackboard and WebCT.
• LAMS runs through all major web browsers. The LAMS server software runs on all major server platforms.
• LAMS is open source software licensed under the General Public License v2. So no license fees, ever.
• LAMS supports educational specifications such as IMS Content Packaging, IMS Metadata, IMS Learning Design.
• LAMS has a large community of teachers, educators and technical developers that share LAMS best-practices and designs as well as foster future version of the system.
• LAMS has commercial support with a company that provide services around its platform. So if you don't have technical or educational expertise, a service company can provide them.
• LAMS aims to be a well documented project, on the technical side as well as the educationally.

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What's New in LAMS 2.3?

For more information on the new features in LAMS 2.3, check out the 2.3 Feature List.

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