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.

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.

Understanding the differences between Chamilo (LMS), BeezNest and the Chamilo Association

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...

On Wednesday 21st of January 2015, the UCL (Université Catholique de Louvain), through an e-mail from its rector's advisor and its co-rector for education and training, announced that it would abandon the development (and usage) of Claroline over a period of 18 months. There's a little mention about Claroline Connect being "immature" at this time, and a comparison between (exclusively) Claroline, Claroline Connect and Moodle in terms of the direction in which the UCL is going and the uniformization of its online education. They decided to go with Moodle for the foreseeable future.