Authoring Designs
Creating Learning Designs
LAMS Authoring
The Authoring Environment (LAMS Author) provides you with a visual interface for creating, editing, storing learning designs.
Accessing LAMS Author
To access LAMS Author:
Author Permissions
Not all LAMS users have Author permissions - sometimes a user may just be allowed to participate in and monitor lessons. If you want to use Author and you don't have permissions, contact your supervisor or System Administrator.
Authoring Basics
Take a look at this very short tutorial to learn the basics of LAMS Authoring.
Authoring Areas
Now let's look at the different areas. There are three main areas in the LAMS Authoring:
Canvas - this is the white area with a grid of dots. It is where learning designs are Created and Edited.
Activity tools - located down the left-hand side of the screen. The toolkit contains all of the activities available for use in the learning design.
Design and management options - located across the top of the screen. These allow File Operations (Saving, Opening) and learning design linking operations (Branching and Gates) as well as allowing users to Preview their sequence.
Start designing learning
To create learning designs or sequences, you drag-and-drop activity tools onto the canvas, and then create transitions to specify the path that learners take through. This Graphic Workflow Model is what principally distinguishes LAMS from other, more content based, Learning Systems by providing teachers with a high level of interactivity and collaboration.
Adding activities to learning design
Connecting activities with transitions
Drawing transitions keyboard short-cuts Alternatively, if you are using a Mac, you can use the Command key (⌘) and while keeping it down, draw a line from one activity to the next. Using Windows, you can use the CTRL key.
Removing activities from a learning design
To Delete an activity from the Canvas, click and drag the activity to the trash can 🗑 in the lower right corner .
Adding content to Activity tools
You can add content and configure LAMS activities just by double-clicking in the activity. This will pop-up the editing page for the activity.
Here's a short example where we create a question within a Q&A activity:
There are a lot of activities to choose from, so each activity will have its own editing page according to what the activity is and what it is meant to be used for. For tutorials on each individual activity, take a look at the Activity tools list.
Saving learning designs
So say you have created the following learning design
Designs can be saved in one of three folders/locations. According where you save them, you make them available to other teachers.
Personal folder By default, designs are saved in your own folder (folder with your name), which means that only you can access them.
Course folders You can also save designs in the folder for each courses you are a member of. For example, if you want to share a design with other teacher that co-teach a course with you, save it in the specific course folder and all the others in this course will have access to this designs. You can work collaboratively on designs with your colleagues this way.
Public Folder Finally, you can save designs in the Public folder, which means that the design will be available to any teacher who can log in to LAMS (and has teachers' rights). Note that if everyone has access to your design, they are able to modify it - so ensure, that you have that in mind.
Sharing and co-creating learning designs
Design and management options
The Toolbar commands are:
File Operation Tools
New - Clears any existing design from the Canvas and provides a blank work area or creating a new design. NB: The command will warn you that it will clear the Canvas and prompt you to save your design.
Use Learning Design Wizards - Within the New button, the dropdown menu gives you a choice to create a new learning design using a teaching methodology or template. Once you select it, it will prompt you to select one of the teaching methodologies templates available to quickly create your learning design.
Open - Allows you to browse your personal, course and public folders to retrieve an already saved design.
Import - Import LAMS designs that were previously exported.
Import part - Import parts or section of other learning designs. To use this, select the design you want to import parts from and then choose which activities you wnat to import.
Save - Saves the current design. If no name has been specified, opens the "Save" window and prompts for file name and location.
Save As - Saves the design under an alternative name.
Export - You can export your learning design into a zip file that contains all the content as well as the structure of your sequence. You can share this zip files with other teachers that use LAMS and they would be be able to import it on their own LAMS server. Alternatively, you might want to share your designs with over 12,600 teachers that share their best designs at the LAMS Community.
Editing Tools
Copy - Copies the selected Activity on the Canvas.
Paste - Pastes a copied Activity back to the Canvas.
Design Tools
Transition - This tool changes the pointer into Transition mode (indicated by a Green pen) for drawing transition lines between two activities. Place the transition tool over the activity you wish to transition 'from,' click and hold the mouse, and draw a line to the activity you wish to transition 'to.' You can also jump quickly to Transition mode by holding down the 'Ctrl' key or the Command key ⌘ in Macs.
Optional - This option allows you to create a "container" for a particular type of activities: Optional activities or Support activities
Flow - provides options for controlling the progress of Learners through the sequence.
Gates - temporarily control stop points for Learner as they progress thru the design. Gates can be a real powerful option to manage your classes.
Branch allows learners to either select a particular path through the design, or automatically chooses a path based on certain conditions.
Groups/Teams - arranges learners into groups or teams for particular activities. (ie: instead of a whole class of learners participating in one chat, there can be several groups of five learners in independent chats.)
Annotations - This feature is very useful to create annotation and comment out sections of your learning design. These comments/annotations can be useful for you and/or other teachers/tutors but are not available for students to see. Only teachers can see them.
Weights - If your learning design has assessment activities or activities that produce mark outputs, you can set the weight that each output might have in the overall mark of the lessons.
Arrange - LAMS can orderly arrange the activities for you in the canvas. Just press this button and LAMS would automatically rearrange the activities to best fit the viewable space.
Preview - allows you to preview how your design will look like for students.
Help
Authoring Help - Links to documentation on LAMS Authoring.
Creating Activities
The main components of any design are the activity tools. Each tool has a set of features specific to what the tool does. However, there are some common features that are found in all tools. This section describes the basic features found on all tools first. There are also pages specific to the properties of each activity. Each tool contains three tabs:
Basic - which controls the Content of the Activity.
Advanced - which controls the Behaviour of the Activity.
Conditions - Some activities support conditions that can help you create conditions to be used for branching decision points.
To create an activity, simply click the desired activity on the tool bar, keep the mouse button held down, and drag the activity onto the canvas. To place the activity, release the mouse button.
Setting the content for Activities - General Features
To change the Content and behaviour of an activity, simply double click a particular activity to bring up it's Properties Page..
To the Left is a screenshot of the Basic tab of a Forum activity. It contains two elements, a Title and Instructions screen.
These elements are found on nearly every activity in LAMS.
All tools have a title that is presented at the top of the Learner Environment - this is where you can specify that title.
Presented under 'Title' is the 'Instructions' section. This is where the main text to be displayed to the learners is created. (TIP: For other tools there is always a section for text instructions or content, although it may have a different name than 'Instructions, ie: Content, Questions, etc.)
Other Activities - See other LAMS Activities available.
Property Inspector
The Properties Inspector provides quick access to some common tasks for Activities: gradebook output, groupings and activity name.
Title - This is the name of the activity. It is shown on the activity box in the Authoring Space, as well as on various screens in the Monitoring Environment, and also in the Progress Bar in the Learner Environment. Ideally, you want to keep Activity Titles as short as possible - less than about 20 characters (including spaces) is recommended. Note: The Title is NOT the same as the Name specified on the Properties Page. Instead, the Title specified in the Properties Inspector provides a quick way to distinguish the activity from others of the same type.
Grouping - All activities can be set to operate in Whole Class Mode or in Groups/Teams Mode. To operate in Groups/Teams Mode, a Teams/Groups activity must be added to the design. Once this is done, any tool can be set to use those groups, creating multiple instantiations of each tool according to the number of groups created. Note: It is possible to create several Team/Groups activities and then choose different grouping structures for different tools. A good example for multiple teams/groups activity in a lesson is in the Jigsaw teaching strategy.
Gradebook output - If the activity you have selected supports outputs (grades, time taken or other), they will be available in this drop down menu. Select which activity output you want to send to the gradebook once students complete the activity. The output types vary from activity to activity depending of what the activity does (assessment, reflection, etc).
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