JISC

This project has now completed. See the project website and the final report available at the foot of this page.

In this proposal we seek 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. 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.

Aims and Objectives

The overall aim of the project is to produce a web-service to provide dynamic group sharing as part of the eFramework. During the project we will show this working as a module that can be accessed both by Moodle and by LAMS.

The specific objectives are to:

• Develop an interface to the Group service to enable it to act as a consumer to the enterprise service and as a provider to learning environments.
• Develop interface hooks or modules for LAMS and Moodle to enable them to cooperatively manage dynamic groups of learners. This work will be extensible to generic learning environments.
• Ensure the Group service is compliant with IMS Enterprise specification (e.g. IMS Enterprise SDK).

Project Methodology

The project is joint between the Open University and LAMS International. To help the collaboration Alex Little from the OU will spend six weeks based at LAMS International on the Macquarie University campus in Sydney, Australia.

The IMS Enterprise Specification will be used to develop a plug-in architecture for group setting. This will be designed to meet the needs for more sophisticated groups than are present in the existing (v1.5) Moodle grouping module. By developing as a separate service grouping can also be applied to other learning environments and tools.

Deliverables

The software developed by this project will be available as open source through sourceforge progress and updated reports are available through the project blog.

Project Partners
Open University
LAMS International