What is the conceptual background to LAMS?
A brief summary is as follows: the concepts of collaborative learning activities and “lesson planning” are as old as education itself, but the recent background to LAMS began in the late 1990s when researchers at the Open University of the Netherlands (led by Professor Rod Koper) reviewed over 100 different teaching and learning contexts in an attempt to determine commonalities across diverse educational scenarios. This ambitious research yielded some key insights into the fundamental structure of education, and led to the development of “Educational Modelling Language” – a language to describe this fundamental structure. The goal of this language was to provide a “pedagogically neutral” way of describing many different types of education. These insights grew into a new field called “Learning Design”. In summary, Learning Design can be described in the deceptively simple phrase “people doing activities with resources/environments”. In essence, education is about individuals and groups
