This announcement signals the birth of "open source teaching", as the LAMS Community encourages the sharing of digital lesson plans under open content licences (using Creative Commons). Now teachers, trainers, and professors can find digital lessons plans that are freely available to use and adapt, and they can share their own creations and adaptations for the benefit of all education.


The LAMS Community is based on the MIT developed open source ".LRN" community platform. Professor James Dalziel, leader of LAMS, recently met with Alfred Essa, Founder and Co-Chair of the .LRN Consortium at MIT, to formalise the use of .LRN for the LAMS Community.


"We are delighted LAMS will use .LRN to host the LAMS Community," said Alfred Essa, "LAMS is a comprehensive open source system for designing and implementing sequences of learning activities. Its visual authoring environment is very impressive".


"The LAMS Community is central to our strategy of empowering teachers to transform education using the revolutionary digital lesson planning approach offered by LAMS. Educators can now freely and openly share 'best practice teaching' in a way never seen before in the history of education," said Professor James Dalziel, leader of LAMS. "We chose .LRN for its sophisticated community management functions, complementary feature set, and our shared open source philosophy," Dalziel said.


The LAMS Community will benefit from powerful .LRN features for community-based news, discussion forums, and sharing digital lesson plans (or "sequences") and other resources. Initial communities will cover Developers, Technical Support, and Education, including sub-communities for K-12, Higher Education & Training, Research & Development, and a new users group called Getting Started. In the future, new sub-communities can be added as interests develop, for example, introductory psychology, maths teachers in the Boston area, occupational health and safety training for retailers, and so on.


The most powerful feature of the LAMS Community will be the ability to share LAMS sequences. Teachers will be able to share their sequences with others, search for sequences, rate sequences, and discuss them. It will even be possible for sequence contributors to see how many times their sequences have been downloaded. The recommended licence for LAMS sequences will be an open content licence using the Creative Commons "share alike" approach, encouraging open source teaching.


In addition to using .LRN for the LAMS Community, LAMS has announced plans to provide integration between LAMS and .LRN for course management, to be available in the coming months. This integration will follow a similar approach to that recently announced between LAMS and Moodle.


John Norman, Director of the Cambridge University Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technology, praised the LAMS/.LRN collaboration, saying, "Both .LRN and LAMS have set the pace in the development of collaborative/active learning platforms for higher education. This integration and co-operation between the two projects will create a powerful learning environment for students".