www.chamilo.org

The history of Chamilo 2.0 can be traced back all the way to 2000 and the Claroline  project. Based on their own experiences and specific needs involving e-learning, the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) started developing a new open-source learning management system, which soon attracted many other interested parties.

By early 2004 a split occurred in the Claroline community and the D0ke0s project was started which built upon Claroline’s foundations and focused on ease of use. After the initial launch, the new LMS is gradually adopted by institutions like Hogeschool Gent, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Universiteit Gent and Erasmushogeschool Brussel (EhB).

Over the years Hogeschool Gent, joined by Erasmus and VUB, started developing the concept of “2.0” as the next logical step in e-learning. Over the years numerous other institutions joined us as well. In early 2010 the entire 2.0 team, together with the majority of the people involved with the legacy 1.8 branch, decided to start a new project called Chamilo.

Goal was to make Chamilo 100% open source (GPLv3) and to start an association which controlled the trademark and was open to all stakeholders. Chamilo as a project was launched on January 18, 2010 with the Chamilo Association being formally launched as a non-profit organization in June 2010.

Saying that Chamilo 2.0 is different from Chamilo 1.x would be a serious understatement, as the 2.0 branch is following a radically different path from the legacy project.

Courses, courses and some more courses

Chamilo 1.8 is a so called LMS of the first generation, which means that it is in essence a collection of tools which have been loosely integrated to form “courses”. Everything in 1.8 revolves around courses and is as such stored in courses. This makes it very hard for an end-user to reuse content without duplication vast amounts of data. On top of that storing everything in virtually isolated courses makes it very hard to perform a search throughout your entire platform.

More problematic is the fact that the courses metaphor is too restrictive in many cases. E.g. projects, communities, general communication channels and collaboration outside the course context. It is of course possible to abuse the courses for these ends, but it is far from the ideal solution.

Anno 2010 most institutions run a plethora of different (online) software suites: some open-source, some closed source, but all serve a very specific need within the institution and often complement one another’s functionality. Because of the complementary nature of these applications it’s only logical that some degree of integration has to be achieved. In Chamilo 1.8 this integration is possible, but exceptionally difficult, especially if the external application doesn’t truly fit into the courses context of Chamilo.

Users and content repositories

After much deliberation on how to address these issues, a specific approach was adopted: Chamilo 2.0 would be user-based instead of course-based. But what does that imply? In essence it all revolves around ownership of content. Whereas previously content was explicitly linked to a course, now we explicitly link content to a user who is then considered it’s owner.

Linking everything to a user implies that the user will need a place to manage all his content and that’s how the “repository” was born. The Chamilo 2.0 repository enables a user to create and manage his own content without it being linked to any specific context. The added advantage of such a repository is that it also allows us to implement additional tools for version management, collaboration (sharing), integration with external content repositories and last but not least: a virtually unlimited amount of content types.

Because of this separate, manageable repository it also becomes possible to create several additional layers of abstraction and functionality on top of that core.

Basic principles

The intention and basic principles of the entire system can be summarized in a few keywords.

• Abstraction: We want to avoid depending on specific vendors or systems at all costs. While implementing various levels of abstraction may be more time consuming, it also avoids having to start all over again when, for a variety of reasons, the back-end of a specific piece of functionality needs to change.
• Flexibility: Users should be able to adapt the platform for their own needs in an easy way. This implies that they should be able to do so without breaking the system and in an intuitive way. The system should adapt to the user and not the other way round.
• Extensibility: No single piece of software is ever complete, so it’s essential that Chamilo 2.0 can be extended to offer additional functionality whenever needed. Adding this new functionality should not require any technical knowledge.
• Modularity: While individual modules might be closely linked together, removing one or more of them should not break the system. The system has to be able to intelligently determine what is and what is not possible based on the modules that are currently available on the platform.
• Dynamical: Using the basic building blocks of the system, both the content and the modules, users should be able to create their own combinations of content.
• “KISS” is an acronym for “Keep it simple and stupid” and implies that simplicity should be a key goal in the design of the platform. Unnecessary complexity should be avoided at all costs whenever possible.

Why use Chamilo 2 ?

What are the advantages of using Chamilo 2 for one of your projects? Reinventing the wheel every single time is an expensive and tiresome thing, so if you could avoid it, why not? For any and every project or application which you want to develop, Chamilo 2 already offers:

• A content repository system with version management and collaboration functionality
• User and user group management
• Integrations with some of the most used single sign-on systems
• Advanced rights management
• Frameworks to enable tracking of users and reporting in a variety of formats
• A flexible and easy way to create links between individual applications
• A multitude of general libraries to handle layout, forms, translations, tables, import, export, calendars, mailing and much more

So ...

After 4 years of development, working closely with the community, end-users and all other interested parties, the entire development team and community proudly present the first release of Chamilo 2.0. Download it now from our download page. Chamilo 2.0 is distributed under the terms of the GNU/GPLv3 license.

Why Edison?

So why did we choose "Edison" as the name for our first release. Thomas Alva Edison was born in the United States in 1847 and is without a doubt one of the most prolific inventors of all time inventing among others the phonograph, the motion picture camera and ... the lightbulb. Like the lightbulb we hope Chamilo 2.0 will bring light to the darkness of the next generation of e-learning. We thought it would only be fitting (no pun intended) to make the first release of Chamilo 2.0 a tribute to the man who brought electric light to a dark world.

Included applications:

• Assessment
• Chamilo Translation Application
• Courses
• Forum
• Personal Calendar
• Personal Messenger
• Portfolio
• Profiler
• Reservations
• Search Portal
• Wiki

Course tools:

• Announcements
• Assessments
• Blogs
• Calendar
• Chat
• Descriptions
• Documents
• Forums
• Geolocation
• Glossary
• Learning Paths
• Links
• Notes
• Streaming Video
• Video Conferencing
• Wikis
• ... as well as tools for groups, sections, settings, maintenance, reporting, rights and users

Connectable external services:

• Flickr / HQ23
• Google Docs
• MediaMosa
• Photobucket
• Picasa
• Soundcloud
• Vimeo
• YouTube
• BigBlueButton

Content types:

• Announcements
• Assessments with matching questions,matrix questions, multiple choice questions, open questions, rating questions, select questions, fill-in-the-blanks questions, hotspot questions and ordering questions
• BigBlueButton meetings
• Blogs & blog items
• Calendar events
• Dailymotion videos
• Descriptions
• Documents
• External Calendars
• Feedback
• Forums (with subforums, topics and posts)
• Glossaries and glossary items
• Hotpotatoes
• Introductions
• Learning paths
• Links
• MediaMosa videos
• Notes
• Personal messages
• Physical locations
• Portfolios
• Profiles
• RSS feeds
• Soundcloud audio tracks
• System announcements
• Tasks
• Templates
• Vimeo videos
• Wikis and wiki pages
• YouTube videos

The end?

Is this the end of the line? Most definately not, it's more like the beginning. The basics are there and now we want to hear from you, our users! We want YOU to tell us what you need. We want YOU to get involved in whichever way possible. We want YOU to give us valuable feedback on our product in terms of bugs, feature requests, usability remarks, etc.

So, did you like what you read? Do you have interesting ideas or suggestions for us? Are you interested in Chamilo 2.0 in general? Is your project interested in collaborating with us? Don’t hesitate to contact us via e-mail or let us know about your project(s) via the community website located at http://www.chamilo.org. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.

One final thing

The only thing that remains now is to thank all those involved over these past few years and who, in one way or another contributed to the realisation of this release and Chamilo 2.0 in general. Please know that your efforts were and are very much appreciated. Special thanks go out to the teams over at:

• Artevelde hogeschool
• Beeznest (Latino)
• Erasmushogeschool Brussel
• Het Perspectief
• Hogeschool Gent
• Hogeschool West-Vlaanderen
• Scholengemeenschap Sint-Pieter Beringen-Lummen
• Université de Genève
• Vrije Universiteit Brussel