Friday, May 09, 2008

Followup on AMS forms

Had a brief meeting with Ruth Bruce from the Kinross group a couple of weeks ago, to look at enhancements made to the AMS platform for putting forms on to mobile phones. Their newest addition is to allow ‘subscriptions’ to be held on a phone so that entry of common items does not need to be continually repeated but only adjusted as required. An example will be the use of an AMS form that has a partially completed sales order, this order can be updated in the field quickly by changing already entered data rather than re-entering all the data from scratch.

Ruth has suggested that we take up a 3 month trial of AMS. Met with Nick Ford yesterday to look at the possibility of aligning AMS to Moodle. We looked at the WSDL code provided on the AMS wiki plus the various other technical information provided. With input from our elearning networking / database guru, Kristian Thornley, we discussed possibilities and challenges along with the reasons WHY we would use AMS forms instead of what we currently now use.

From our discussion, we decided to run a trial to compare the three possible ways we could sent formative assessment questions to student mobile phones. These would be using the AMS forms, using SMS via eTXT and direct web download of quizzes from Moodle. We will evaluate time taken to download, cost of downloads, usability issues and student preferences. I will work on writing up a survey to evaluate these and fund the student downloads using our CPIT Foundation grant.

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