Although the hype around MOOCs has faded a bit already, these Massively Open Online Courses are now part of the daily internet products or services you can invest in to make your professional or personal life better in the short, medium or even long term. But where some platforms like EdX clearly specialize in MOOCs, some people ask us whether Chamilo is ready for MOOCs.
In recent years, the Chamilo LMS software we develop has grown in size, to something that many people might consider unreasonable (to some extent, we do too). This article explains why the Chamilo package for Chamilo 1.11.8 weighs 1100MB (yeah, 1.1GB!) or, in its compressed form, about 285MB. We've heard comments of many people about this. These usually go like this:
Next January 23 and 24, another edition of the prestigious international Learning Technologies France 2018 event (# LT18France) is held, which also includes #iLearningForum 2018, an activity that brings together leading companies and learning professionals from all over Europe. Chamilo LMS and the BeezNest group will be participating in this important activity in Europe in the field of technology at the service of learning.
In this article, we'll talk about managing an LMS when all institutional assignments handed in by students have to be handed in through the LMS, and what that means if you have several thousand students. This case is based on one of our customers which provides in-class English courses to about 55,000 students in a monthly cycle. The institution started working with us in 2012, so it's already been 5 years since we've started developing their custom Chamilo LMS setup.
As a web developer configuring SSL certificates on websites you deliver, as we do, you might be faced, one day, with a small issue about configuring a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS that has to be reverted. It so happens that browsers *really* take it to heart to cache an HTTP 301 (permanent redirect) message seriously and deeply. So much so that it might become very difficult to remove this redirect and ever be able to access the site in HTTP again.
If you're developing PHP software today but studied PHP based on old-ish manuals or manuals written by people who did, you might find a mix of calls to dirname(__FILE__) and __DIR__ and wonder what the difference is...
This article can be considered an update of our first article on installing Chamilo (on a Raspberry Pi B+). This time, we are testing it with Raspberry 3, as of the 1st of April 2017 (no joke intended). Last time, we were testing with Chamilo 1.9, which is arguably less load-intensive, considering it doesn't include any Symfony component, and it doesn't require any .htaccess configuration.
There is a surprising number of cases where you'd want to change the URL of a Chamilo portal, but the more common we see is when you take a backup copy of a portal and want to use that copy to build a new test portal. Obviously, if you keep the same URL, you're going to have difficulties having them both running at the same time. Chamilo is not good at managing several URLs (although another article on this blog will help you do that), and even less good at managing a dynamic URL, so there are 3 necessary steps to change the URL (this is valid at least until version 1.11 of Chamilo).
Ergonomics and usability with Chamilo LMS. Sometimes Open Source software gets criticized for lacking behind proprietary software when talking about compelling interfaces. Many people in our community, after spending years with other solutions, describe our software, Chamilo LMS, as the easiest to use and to manage. We would like to take this opportunity to explain what lead us there. This all starts with a simple act: caring about ergonomics from the start.
Truth be told, we didn't do a lot of efforts to make this clear in the past, but as Chamilo LMS growth more popular and the business needs around Chamilo increase considerably, I feel like things should be set straight to avoid confusion and to make sure that anybody can find a valid reference to any answer they might have to give in a speech or a simple meeting with other interested third parties. Let's first proceed chronologically...