2011 Asia Pacific LAMS & Learning Design Conference
To view some of the content on this site, you will need to install Adobe Reader.
Abstracts
Bringing the world into the classroom:
Developing 21st century competencies in learners
Chen Siyun, Chestnut Drive Secondary School, Singapore
Bearing in mind the C2015 desired students outcomes, we integrate ICT into curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, to achieve our various objectives.
Using the chapter on classification, we help the students to make sense of the world around them, teaching them an important skill of organising complex information.
Lessons started with students doing collaborative work online, constructing a series of mind maps. Students learned to classify and organise the vast number of non-living things around them by using their creativity and by readjusting and constructing their own knowledge and understanding accordingly as they correct their misunderstanding by learning through a guided reflection after every mind map. Teacher acts only as a facilitator in these lessons, including guiding the students to explore the world around them, collecting their own data for their mind maps through a mobile learning trail using Microsoft Tag.
To classify living things, students were led through a series of activities creating their own Zoo of organisms from Southeast Asia online, learning through design and play. This project involves an international collaboration with students from South Africa, where the students act as active contributors, sharing their knowledge, communicating and collaborating across the globe with South African students, and in turn learned about the classification of organisms from South Africa students. Students are exposed to another culture and habitat, developing into global citizens.
This project would be expanded to include schools from other countries such as Australia and China. This lesson package would be a foundation for students to work on a further international collaboration project on Ecosystem.
Reusable Learning Designs in Medical Education
Bronwen Dalziel, University of Western Sydney, Australia
Medical students have access to a wealth of content through the internet and yet most medical schools make little use of this content in a structured manner, and are protective of their own course materials. Our model of teaching medical students at the University of Western Sydney is to harness internet medical content by using Learning Designs (implemented with LAMS) to guide students through freely available content in order to teach them the adult learning skills that they will need as professionals. This is very important in the medical profession, as medical science knowledge is in a constant state of advancement and doctors, as lifelong learners, should continually update their knowledge and skills.
Using a Learning Design approach as opposed to a content driven approach has also allowed us to make our Learning Designs freely available to other medical schools for repurposing (e.g. language or discipline changes), reusing, and giving back to the education community. It is our goal to grow a community of medical educators who can develop Learning Designs and share experiences so that 'reinventing the wheel" is less common and good practice can be more easily adopted in both old, new, advantaged or less advantaged medical schools around the world.
Learning Design and Strategic Pedagogical Change
Paul Gagnon, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
This presentation will focus on the ways that LAMS supported the rapid design, development and delivery of a Team-based Blended Learning pedagogy to rollout the first PhD programme for the recently established Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School here in Singapore. Specifically, the presentation will outline how the 30 research scientists were prepared for the new pedagogical application, how each of their two class sessions were designed, delivered and facilitated, using an adaptation of the what is known in Team-Based learning as (i) Individual Readiness Assessment (IRA), (ii) Group Readiness Assessment (GRA) and (iii) an Application Exercise.
How LAMS can be used in Teacher Education in Mauritius in the future?
Anuradha Gungadeen, Mauritius Institute of Education(MIE), Republic of Mauritius
I am currently working as Lecturer in Open and Distance Learning at the Mauritius Institute of Education (MIE) which is the sole Teacher Education training institute in Mauritius. Unfortunately, the LAMS is still unknown to Mauritius and I intend to make effective use of LAMS in Teacher Training laying emphasis on the 'pedagogy-first' approach where educators will be trained on the pedagogical approaches to LAMS. The educators will side by side actively involved in developing contextualised learning scenarios for adaptive learning by making use of pedagogical tools in LAMS. By so doing, educators will create a wide array of digital and flexible learning objects within LAMS. This will reinforce community of practice among educators and this will no doubt have a cascading effect in Teacher Education. This entire process is an incremental one and the Teacher Community will take about one to two years to embrace the tools. However, the major challenges remain the mindset of some educators, access to technology and recognition.
Using LAMS at Technological University: Successes and Challenges
Kevin Jones, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
LAMS has been used to sequence the on-line learning portion of the Software Engineering subject since 2008. The presentation will share the experiences of the author in applying LAMS to this endeavour.
Software Engineering is a core second-year subject, and the first of its kind in the university to incorporate a blended learning teaching and learning for the full term. LAMS provides the structure for a sequence of thirteen weeks of material introduction, study, and assessment. LAMS tracks the students in their journeys through each weekly segment of the subject sequence. After each week's learning is completed, LAMS tables the results of each student's participation in the on-line sequence. LAMS has proved adept in coordinating and tracking on-line participation.
The last part of the presentation will deal with the challenges of LAMS in the authoring mode. As an authoring tool, it has some demonstrable weakness. It is not easy to revise an existing program, and linking to resources is very slow and antiquated. The editor does not provide enough customizability of some constructs. Finally, there is a significant scarcity of performance statistics available to a sequence designer from LAMS.
Setting up a CoP for LAMS to share best pedagogical practices in SP
Gerald Ng, Singapore Polytechnic, Singapore
In the traditional way of delivering electronic learning through Singapore Polytechnic, (SP), Blackboard (Bb) has been used primarily as a repository for content. It is not progressed and regarded as a hindrance to effective online learning. Its usability and functionality are being questioned.
A new generation of an open-sourced software, LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) that are better suited to meet the dynamic online learning content, interaction, collaboration and networking. Whereas traditional LMS approaches traditionally tend to relegate students to be more passive learners, LAMS will allow learners to take proactive control of their own learning.
This paper will discuss on how LAMS, not only affected the design and delivery, but allow lecturers to co-create and share their LAMS templates. Through LAMS, SP will evolve into a community of practice for sharing, co-creating and collaboration among lecturers and practitioners.
Advancing from Blackboard to LAMS
J. Selva Raj, Singapore Polytechnic, Singapore
In this paper, we want to share our experiences in adopting the open-source Learning Activity Management Systems (LAMS) to refine the School of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering's existing Blackboard (BB) learning environment. The scope of our project is from October 2009 to March 2011. We share our experiences from when our Learning Technology team were inspired by possibilities that LAMS presented to enhance teaching and learning, through to initiating a programme of training of faculty, awareness and progressive adoption of this innovative teaching using technology with students.
However, we hope that we will not delude you into thinking that LAMS in any sort of pedagogical panacea. Teaching and Learning is a complex mix of human interaction, emotion, formal structure and increasingly technology.
Ultimately as teachers, you will have to examine, evaluate and decide for yourselves how much this new and novel system can help you as an educational strategy in your teaching and learning journey.
Using LAMS to teach a Project Management course for a class of 40 learners
Yap Chin Hooi, Singapore Polytechnic, Singapore
The use of a Learning Management System (LMS) in an e-learning environment is not new and continual strides have been made towards improving lesson planning. In the SP School of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering (MAE), LAMS has been adopted in October 2010 to improve lesson planning and to engage student's learning. LAMS (open sourced software) has been installed and integrated into the Blackboard (BB) learning environment.
This paper describes the teaching of a project management course based on a blended pedagogical model in an online environment. Forty learners have been identified to use LAMS lessons, both in and outside of classroom using wi-fi activated laptops. As educators we must explore and exploit emerging info-communication technologies tools to engage and stimulate our 21st century learners.
E-learning Strategy of EFL Pedagogy in China
Zhao Shuo, Northwestern Polytechnic University, China
This paper's main aim is to identify and discuss the areas of E-learning Strategy of EFL(English as Foreign Language) Pedagogy that are important in describing the state of university teaching and students learning, specifically related to the need for systems and actions for student support system. As a basis for illustrating E-learning strategy of EFL pedagogy in China the paper presents different theoretical approaches to distance teaching and learning such as student independence and autonomy, teaching-learning conversation, guided didactic conversation, continuity of concern for students and cooperative learning and constructivism. The paper further discusses the conflict of interest between students who prefer cooperative learning methods and students who both prefer and need a high degree of flexibility to be able to enrol and succeed in E-learning programmes. The paper also discusses different models explaining E-learning education. High quality E-learning education systems have traditionally emphasised student support and continuous concern for students from enrolment to completion. It is the author's view that theory and practices from online education are valid for E-learning and should be implemented into E-learning practice. Finally, the author presents a theoretical framework for student support services in online distance education with his own institution. The conclusion of this paper is to identify the pedagogical principles underlying the teaching and learning activities that constitute effective E-Learning. An analysis and synthesis of the principles and ideas by practicing E-learning will also be presented, in the perspective of deploying an effective Learning Management Systems (LMS) as means of EFL pedagogy.
The Moodle 2 Integration
Ernie Ghighlione, MELCOE
Ernie is the LAMS Project Manager, based at the Macquarie E-- Learning Centre of Excellence (MELCOE), Macquarie University. In this presentation, Ernie will discuss the progress and development of the LAMS integration into Moodle 2.
Using LAMS to teach Geography and Biology in K-12
students: A rural Greek high school case study
Katsenos Iannis, Avgio High School, Greece
Spyros Papadakis, Hellenic Open University, Greece
Students in remote rural schools in Greece lack often both motives for participation and opportunities to participate in innovative lessons. Two LAMS sequences were applied in the context of Geography and Biology disciplines at the remote Avgio High School. The students, although sceptical and reluctant in their majority initially to participate, turned out to be very enthusiastic. LAMS sequences proved to be very attractive to them. LAMS sequences also proved to be a more efficient learning means from the traditional methods applied in this target group.
e-Portfolio and Student wiki interdisciplinary project
Trikartikaningsih Byas,
Queensborough Community College, City University of New York
Due to their potential in assessing and promoting student learning and reflection, the application of e-Portfolios has grown in North American colleges and universities. This paper explores a project entitled the Student Wiki Interdisciplinary Group which, through partnership of students in different courses using Epsilen academic environment, creates a shared space allowing students to electronically archive and share their written and audio/video compositions. The project aims at encouraging symphonic reflections whose data are gathered via three identical online surveys administered at different times. The analysis of the survey data demonstrates student growth and the recursive nature of the surveys cultivates student awareness of the process. At the institutional level, the project fulfils the High Impact practice mandate, meets the General Education objectives, and helps retain students.