Differences between Moodle and Chamilo

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?

How to migrate from Claroline to Chamilo

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.

Does the world's growth go along with a Moodle sites reduction?

In a growing world with growing education needs, one would think that systems like Chamilo or Moodle would have a continuous growth ensured, year after year. Well, this is certainly true for Chamilo LMS (for now), as it is apparently gaining about 100,000 new users per month (average over the last 12 months), but I am a little in shock at how Moodle is (since a year or so) loosing a considerable amount of sites and users over the last 12 months.

e-learning platforms list

Just as a reference for later (in alphabetical order) - this list was originally quickly composed as part of the planning of a comparative study which was not concluded: Open Source:
  • A-Tutor
  • Canvas LMS
  • Chamilo
  • Claroline
  • Docebo
  • Dokeos
  • eLMS
  • Ilias
  • Moodle
  • OLAT
  • Sakai
  • .LRN
Non Open Source:
  • Angel (now Blackboard)
  • Blackboard
  • CourseMill
  • e-Doceo
  • e-Ducativa
  • SharePoint LMS
  • TotalLMS
  • WebCT

BPC - Blackboard to be replaced by Moodle in one institution

The LMS Evaluation Commitee of the University of North Carolina at Charlorte just published the results of a 5 quarters survey about the implementation of Moodle to replace their current BlackBoard Vista. Although I don't particularly like Moodle (mostly because our users find it much more complicated to use than Dokeos), there are two things that I really liked in the results from this report (and I'm sure there are loads of other interesting data in there if you keep your eyes opened)

When it all started...

Did you ever wonder when Dokeos really started to change code on the basis of the Claroline project? Well, Sourceforge's got an answer for you... The first commit ever made (by Olivier Brouckaert, like many of the first 2000 commits, I still don't understand how it is humanly possible) was made on the 23rd of January 2004. So basically, as far as we talk about the code itself, Dokeos is celebrating its 5 years and a month today!

eLML

I sure am discovering a lot of interesting stuff on the net this week. I'm just done reading and watching a video on the eLML website. First reaction: interesting project. Apparently, some of the developers of fellow e-learning management system OLAT are involved in the development of eLML as well. eLML is just an XML schema for writing learning content.