Dynamic Grouping for Learning Activities
This project sought to use the most popular open source learning environment, Moodle, together with a high profile activity management system (LAMS) to address the specific issue of dynamic group formation in support of learning activities.
Summary
As learners enrol on courses or undertake sequences of activities they will reach different points at different times. Many of the activity designs proposed in Learning Design or supported by the LAMS system exploit collaboration and so need a group of students that are ready to perform similar tasks at the same time. In this project we focus on the use of services to implement dynamic groups using the IMS Enterprise specification for groups and the tool integration approach developed in SLeD2 to apply this to validate a service using Moodle and LAMS.
The project was carried out by the Open University in collaboration with LAMS International Pty. To help the collaboration regular telephone meetings were held between the project manager and lead developers at LAMS (during the early morning UK and evening Australia) and Alex Little from the OU spent six weeks based at LAMS International on the Macquarie University campus in Sydney, Australia.