LMS Chronicles

In our exchanges with users and the Chamilo association that manages the Chamilo user forum, a recurring question often arises:

Hello Chamilo, a quick question:

I was recently asked to highlight the differences between Moodle and Chamilo. From what I’ve observed, both LMS platforms seem to offer similar features through comparable modules.

What sets Chamilo apart from Moodle?

Well, it was rather a low priority task (due to its possible difficulty), but it has been advancing so well in just two days that I think I can already make a little preview on this... First of all, I'd like to officially welcome Guillaume Viguier-Just, who joined forces with us just yesterday. Guillaume has a considerable PHP development experience, so it's been pretty easy for me to give him a few basic tasks in Chamilo and it's apparently been pretty easy for him to honor them.

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).

Although not directly related to Blackboard's *popularity* per se, the open letter to Blackboard's CEO by Desire2Learn's CEO is just one of the things I just have to note down for further reference... http://www.desire2learn.com/Million/ I haven't tracked the thing itself, so I don't know what happened next, but that's a pretty nice letter, I would say. For the sake of information preservation, I am copy-pasting the contents of this link here, because I recently had a case of permanently loosing a link and it's just one of these upsetting s