lms

For all those of you who've been expecting this release for a long time, we are finally closing in and this week seems to be the ideal time to have ourselves an first release candidate, which will last only one week of all goes well. Unlike previous versions, Chamilo 1.8.8.4 doesn't bring any major new feature. Instead, it is the fruit of a very deep process of trials and fixes, which has been lasting more than 60 days now and sums up to a staggering 1000 of working hours.

Quite easy to start Chamilo Rapid on your own computer with OpenOffice.org v3 installed:

soffice -nologo -nofirststartwizard -headless -norestore -invisible "-accept=socket,host=localhost,port=2002,tcpNoDelay=1;urp;"

Then just go into your portal admin page and configure the Chamilo Rapid as localhost on port 2002 and save.

There's a nice article about open-source tools for e-learning on one of the blogs around eFront (another open-source LMS) http://blog.efrontlearning.net/2010/10/open-source-authoring-tools-for-e.html

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).

Richard Nantel, of Brandon Hall, recently published a few summary results of the last edition of e-learning management systems comparisons, the expensive (but we imagine of high quality) Low-Cost Learning Management Systems 2009 Data shows that solutions for 500 users go from US$499 to as hig