Chamilo.org is the official website of Chamilo, an open source, easy to use and extensible e-learning and collaboration platform which will improve your way of learning.

Moving up with Opencast Matterhorn in Chamilo 2.0

The importance of audiovisual media can hardly be underestimated. Not only is it an essential tool for distance learning, but it can also enrich and supplement traditional learning in a variety of ways. Getting audio and video from Chamilo (or many other platforms) to the end-user often proves to be difficult to say the least. Tools like YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion are nice, but are often too limited in an educational context. Even though Chamilo 2.0 will be supporting full integration of sites like YouTube (check the article Opening Pandora's Box: Chamilo 2.0 Repositories), users will more then likely want things which are not possible on the aforementioned platforms.

So what's the alternative? Setting up your own streaming media platform of course. This way you control the content yourself and you can allow people to add content which might be approved for educational viewing but not for public viewing. One such platform is Opencast Matterhorn, which released it's first stable version earlier this month.

Matterhorn is an open-source platform that aims to be the ultimate platform to support educational audio and video. Via Matterhorn users will be able to schedule lecture recordings, add existing content from a variety of sources and distribute that content to different channels. Channels right now include an embeddable streaming video player, YouTube and iTunesU.

On top of all that Matterhorn works with so called workflows which allow you to define templates of how content should be made available. E.g. as a Flash movie, a high-resolution download and a burnable DVD which will play on a standalone player. The sky is more or less the limit.

Management of the platform is possible by means of an extremely extensive set of REST webservices and gives us the perfect opportunity to integrate Opencast Matterhorn with Chamilo 2.0. The team over at Erasmus University College Brussels is currently analyzing both Matterhorn and the different ways we can integrate it with Chamilo 2.0. Stay tuned for a report detailing the results of that analysis.

Even though Matterhorn is still a relatively young project, it's already backed by a very impressive community which contains some of the leading educational institutions in the world. (UC Berkeley, Cambridge, Indiana U, ETH Zurich, ...)

If you want to learn more about Opencast Matterhorn, visit http://www.opencastproject.org/ for more information on every aspect of the project, ranging from architecture over usage to development and implementation.

Universidad do Tocantins, Brazil, welcomes Chamilo

The University of Tocantins, Brazil, early adopter of Chamilo 1.8 and active contributor to its translation to Brazilian, invited representatives of the Chamilo Association to discuss the open-source business model and Chamilo during a two-days event filled with meetings and speeches, culminating in a 320-people speech about Chamilo and open-source software development in the real world, a short course about how to contribute code to Chamilo and the signature of a two-years collaboration agreement between the association and the university. Pictures below...

To Have and Have Not: Chamilo 2.0 Rights Management

User account control, (digital) rights management, access control, credentials verification ... It hardly matters what you call it, it’s one of those annoying realities of life. In the ideal world there would be no need to check any kind of access rights, but since that utopia is still more or less a dream, we need a system. What does “the” system have to know?

  • Who are you?
  • Where are you?
  • What do you want to do?

The reply is simple enough; it can be reduced to the most basic components a computer can understand:  a simple 0 or 1, true or false. For the humans among you that would be a “go ahead” or “no can do, buster”.
Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong. The theory of it all might be deceivingly easy, but in reality rights management is a combination of complex (hierarchical) structures, inheritance, locks, algorithms and last but not least: frustrated users. Because of the sheer complexity and scale of such systems it’s often a nightmare to maintain and an even bigger nightmare to set up or implement.

Download the complete 28-page article / document now and find out about the what, why and how of external repository integration in Chamilo 2.0.

Opening Pandora's Box: Chamilo 2.0 Repositories

re•pos•i•tor•y
[ri-poz-i-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee]
–noun, plural -tor•ies.
1.    a receptacle or place where things are deposited, stored, or offered for sale: a repository for discarded clothing.
2.    an abundant source or supply; storehouse: a repository of information.

So there you have it: a place where information is deposited. Repositories are ancient, there’s nothing new about them. Mankind has been gathering and storing knowledge ever since they realized they can do things which no other critter on this planet can do (for now). Some of these repositories have taken on almost legendary proportions like e.g. the library of Alexandria, that famous repository of knowledge of the ancient world. For centuries though, such repositories were only accessible for a select group of people: scholars, nobility, clergy, etc. After all knowledge is power and quite a few people didn’t exactly feel like sharing that power.

But let’s flash-forward in time just a little bit, to the 20th century to be somewhat more exact. The “microcomputer” was born, which opened up a multitude of options concerning the sharing of knowledge. But unless you went around exchanging a diverse selection of ever more exotic media to get knowledge from one computer to another, sharing knowledge was still cumbersome. That turned out to be a minor obstacle though. We can’t share information between computers? Well, then let’s hook them up in one big global network. Anno 2010 we call this the “internet”.

Coming up with a global (no pun intended) definition of the internet is difficult to say the least. For the sake of simplicity and to keep things confined to the context of this article its best regarded as an almost infinite repository of knowledge. There are the obvious repositories like Wikipedia  and YouTube, but also things like the BBC News  website, a local broadcaster’s television guide, etc.

There’s thousands of ways we can use these repositories to share information, but because of that global information highway at least we can do it with relative ease. At the same time we risk flooding people with enormous amounts of information which might be irrelevant in their specific case. So we built repositories on top of repositories to facilitate our quest for that particular piece of knowledge. Google  is just one the many examples of super-repositories out there. It “knows” a lot of things about an even bigger amount of websites, thus making it easier for us to find that which we are looking for. At least in theory.

Download the complete 46-page article / document now and find out about the what, why and how of external repository integration in Chamilo 2.0.
 

Chamilo 1.8.7.1, Palmas, now available

Just two months after the release of Chamilo 1.8.7, we're making version 1.8.7.1 available for download. It is a minor update, which includes fixes to potential security flaws as well as a few interesting new features, and is very easy to update or install. Please make sure you upgrade your server as soon as possible if you have a previous version of Chamilo. Download it from here.

Chamilo 1.8.7.1 has been named Palmas after the very recent and rapidly growing city of Palmas, Brazil, in which a few of the people in charge of the Brazilian Portuguese translation are located.

This version is a minor version, which means it doesn't implement important new features, but rather focuses on stabilizing the existing ones. However, we managed to slip a few new features inside, like:

  • Added shuffling to multiple answers
  • Added simple document search feature
  • Enabled PDF export for HTML documents
  • Added simple social network link featurei (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, ...) and short URL feature for users profile
  • Added e-mail notification on wiki updates
  • Added ASCIIMathML for mathematical formulas edition
  • Improved SCORM 1.2 tracking
  • Re-enabled course tutor role: a student can be tutor and help the teacher
  • Adding an assignment to the calendar is now done by hand out date instead of creation date
  • General improvements in gradebook tool and file manager

If you are worried about loosing data during the upgrade, please ask on our forum or to an official provider near you.

Chamilo 2.0 Developers Meeting Report

On July 7, 2010 the Chamilo 2.0 development team met in Ghent (Belgium) to discuss the current status of the project and the plans we have for the future, as well as the pending release of Chamilo 2.0 itself.

First of all there are some important dates we would like to share with you, so you all have something to look forward too:

  • August 18 & 19: "Chamilo 2.0 Sprint" focusing on coding, documentation, testing and translations. The sprint will be organized in Ghent.
  • October 18: Release of the second Chamilo 2.0 Beta
  • November 22: Release of the first Chamilo 2.0 Release Candidate

After the first release candidate (or "golden master" for the Apple afficionados) things might go pretty fast as it has the potential to be the final product, ready to release unless fatal bugs emerge. So stay tuned for these releases / packages, because we'll need your help to make sure everything is tested as well as possible.

Selected highlights from the progress report:

  • The Chamilo Package Manager already allowed us to install seperate so called packages or modules. However, considering the modular nature of the platform, update functionality is an absolute necessity. One might very well have version 1.0 of the repository installed, version 1.5 of the courses application, etc. ... and you should be able to update each and every one of them seperately. That is, as long as their dependencies are not conflicting. On top of all that the installation of our content objects was completely seperated from the repository installation. This now allows you to do "extra" things for your content object, one of them being the automatic installation of example objects into a user's repository.
  • During the previous Chamilo 2.0 Code Sprint the architecture of the course tools was completely rewritten to allow for more flexibility and at the same time generalizing base functionality across all tools. One of the main advantages right now is the possibility to list course publications in several different ways. Previously most tools were limited to a specific view, e.g. a list for announcements, a table for assessments, etc. Implementing extra views implied adding a lot of extra code even though the idea was the same everywhere. To facilitate this process the so called renderer has been abstracted to provide several views by default: table, list, gallery table and slideshow. Enabling them for a specific tool is just a matter of listing them in that tool's allowed views array.
  • A lot of work was done on a multitude of applications: surveys, portfolio, internship organizer, iCal parser, gradebook, peer assessment, reporting, a Wikipedia-like view for our wikis and finally a lot of general layout enhancements
  • Nowadays a lot of content is hosted externally using services like YouTube, Flickr, Google Docs, etc. On top of that several open standards exist to connect to an extensive array of external repositories. The project desperately needed a generic way to connect with these external services. (external from a platform point-of-view) Several steps were already taken in the past to make this possible. The team of the university of Geneva implemented a connection with the Swiss educational Fedora repository and over at Erasmus we implemented a YouTube / streaming media manager to connect to several streaming servers. Now that these features have been merged and the architecture has been sufficiently abstracted we can, at least in theory, support an unlimited number of services directly from our Chamilo 2.0 repository. Currently supported are: YouTube, MediaMosa (developed by the VUB team), Flickr and Google Docs ... and plenty more connectors are on their way. Stay tuned for a follow-up post expanding on this subject.
  • The team at Hogeschool Gent completely refactored the migration application. An essential component as people are somewhat unlikely to start from scratch when migrating to Chamilo 2.0. The new architecture is lightweight, easier to use and implement (for those of you who want to write an extension to migrate from other, unnamed, LMSes to Chamilo 2.0).

Selected highlights from the To Do list:

  • Even more migration extensions and external repository managers
  • Extensive implementation of the Chamilo 2.0 rights management
  • Several applications are under development: student tracking system, campus plugin, assessment, competences, gradebook
  • Checking DBMS-support (including but not limited to PostgreSQL)
  • A quick starter's guide for developers being written by the team from Hogeschool Gent
  • A complete reference manual for developers being written by the Erasmus team

For a complete overview, check the following documents:

200 people gathered for Chamilo P@rty 2010 in Expoelearning Lima

The 7th of July of 2010 will definitely be a date to remember for the Latin American community of Chamilo.

Chamilo P@rty only lasted 2h30, yet we had time to

  • discuss open-source tools to manage the education process (by Yannick Warnier, Director, BeezNest) [slides]
  • present the challenges we face everyday in e-learning (by Sergio Correa, Director, NO2) [slides]
  • explain the Chamilo association and the development projects for 1.8 (Yannick Warnier) [slides]
  • present the new tools in Chamilo 1.8.7 (by Carlos Vargas, independent)
  • explain the development and usage of the Drupal - Chamilo module (by Fernando P. García, Drupal Association) [slides]

The context of the Expoelearning event, mostly oriented to businesses and private institutions, gave us a great environment and allowed us to meet a lot of corporate representatives, a type of users or potential users that we generally fail to get interested into our software. Here is a picture of Chamilo fans who wanted to record this great moment (there were 5 time as many people in the room half an hour before the picture was taken).

BeezNest Latino represented the Chamilo Association (through its secretary) and the Chamilo community of Peru throughout the event with 6 staff members helping all visitors to find relevant information about Chamilo.

The event resulted in an increase in 10% of the website visits and a lot of inquiries about Chamilo.

You can check more pictures of the event on Picasa. Finally, for the Spanish speakers among you, we managed to record one hour of video about the new features in Chamilo 1.8.7.

Chamilo 2.0 beta release, now available for download!

After a few weeks of intensive programming, a Chamilo "code sprint" and several meetings, the Chamilo 2.0 development team and the entire Chamilo Community are very pleased to announce the release of 2.0 beta of Chamilo! It's one (relatively) small step for our development team, but a major step towards the final release of Chamilo 2.0: the world's best e-learning and collaboration software.

Highlights of this beta release:

  • The tools architecture of the courses application was rewritten from scratch
  • A new "streaming" tool
  • Different views for course tools (list, table, calendar, gallery, slideshow, ...)
  • Visual cleanup of several components and applications
  • Lots of refactoring, improving stability and reusability of key components and applications
  • Countless bugfixes

...and much more.

Download it now from our download page or try it on http://beta.chamilo.org

 

Web server moving to new host - scheduled downtime

Due to the tremendous activity of our community, we are planning improvements to this website. Because this implies having the architecture changed, we will need to put the website down for a while. We will try our best to reduce the website downtime to the minimum needed, but because DNS changes are always taking a few hours to propagate all around the world, it is likely you will not be able to access the server during this time. Please ensure your browser cache is cleaned before trying to access this server again after the upgrade period has started.

The downtime has been scheduled to next Wednesday, 30th of June, from 3pm to 5pm, Brussels time (GMT+2). This means 8am to 10am, Chicago time (GMT-5).

We apologize in advance for any inconvenience caused.

The Chamilo website team

Chamilo 2.0 alpha release, now available for download!

The Chamilo 2.0 development team and the entire Chamilo Community is very pleased to announce the release of 2.0 alpha of Chamilo! This is a major new step in the process of releasing world's best e-learning and collaboration software.

  • completely rewritten from scratch with latest development techniques
  • a central object repository for each user
  • no more duplication of user data
  • a rich set of optional applications available (personal messenger, e-portfolio, gradebook, ..)

...and much more.

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