Supporting the delivery of learning-contents with laboratory activities in Sakai: Work-in-progress report

Educational and training-providinginstitutions are increasingly depending on the web-based Learning Management System (LMS) for delivering course-contents in both on-campus and distance classes. This system offers an easily-accessible environment with various tools for managing learners and courses, and for producing rich contents. However, beside the rich contents, certain fields of study require that courses be accompanied with/followed by laboratory activities which help learners deepen their understanding of the new concepts and develop skills on applying them in close-to-real-world context. More emphasize has been put on these activities when laboratory-based courses appeared and proved to be functioning well in delivering the information. Several stand-alone laboratories have been constructed to support delivery of such activities on-line, but laboratory-tools are not available within the LMS. To address this point, our research presents an approach towards integrating one stand-alone laboratory (NVLab) into Sakai LMS to enable the use of laboratory activities within the course context. The study suggests integrating parts of the original system into Sakai, and then using the LMS's “linktool“ to connect to the other part. So far, an initial version of the new tool has been accomplished and we are in the testing phase of the new tool on a demo version of Sakai before putting it into service within the campus-wide system.