e-learning

I'll be talking about Chamilo and the state of open-source software in Peru on Radio Panik tonight, 7pm Paris time. French only: http://www.radiopanik.org/spip/Ecoutez-radio-Panik

I will be presenting Chamilo and our intention to make a Chamilo package for Ubuntu this year at the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Brussels, on Friday 14th of May (at the beginning of the afternoon).

During the last 10 years, online social networks rised from the ground and shot through the clouds of our daily lives at impressive speed. During the last 3 years, specialized social networks started to appear, including many focused on learning.

Apparently we have to improve our documentation (this is clearly an understatement). In Chamilo 1.8.6.2 and 1.8.7, there is a new checkbox in the admin panel for courses edition which says "Special course", and which you can check.

Today I just saw one of the most beautiful examples of what our efforts (as a community of free software, standards, formats and knowledge evangelists) are all leading to. In short, I'm talking about the Wikipedia page in English for the OGG standard, which I'm publishing a capture of below.

We have released Chamilo 1.8.7 alpha 1 today. See the announcement on the website: http://www.chamilo.org/en/news/chamilo-1.8.7-alpha-released.

2016 edit: Please note that these quick references might not be up to date anymore. Please refer to our official developers documentation at https://github.com/chamilo/docs/tree/master/1.10/en/developer for more up-to-date information. This is an update of previous development sheets of Dokeos. Now you've got them for Chamilo.

As we are closing in on the first Alpha release of Chamilo, we can already see the first glance of the large e-learning machine being built here. In only 3 months, we'll have passed from a first, timid, release of Chamilo 1.8.6.2, to a much more stable and complete 1.8.7. In order to improve it, we have listened to our users.

Dokeos 1.8.6.2 will ship a new beta tool, the time tracker for exercises.

We have a student working for us on comparisons between various LMSes here, and we recently moved on to Sakai. We've been looking a bit at installing it on an Ubuntu 9.04 and boy... is this a challenge. While there seems to be a few sources of documentation around the web (including on the Sakai website itself) on how to install it, they're all giving a 20 pages-long guide on how to install a specific version of Java (from sources), a specific version of Tomcat (from sources) and a specific version of Sakai (from sources as well).