www.chamilo.org

The Chamilo Community Day event is now open for registration, and will be held on Thursday, March 8th 2012 from 10h00 - 17h00 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium.

This event is organized to give our community the opportunity to provide us with feedback and suggestions to improve the operation of the Chamilo Association and its software.
We will start this event with the presentation of the Annual Report 2011 where the Board members will give you an overview of all things that happened inside our community during the last year. This will include more information about our users/members, software development progress & projects defined early in 2011.

In the afternoon we will organize 2 discussion groups to talk about several topics and will try to provide the Chamilo Assocation with improvements and suggestions.
The outcome of these discussions will be integrated into several project ideas for 2012. These project proposals will be presented and discussed at the General Assembly 2012 that will be held on Friday, the 9 of March in Brussels.

Chamilo LMS is the winner of the contest organized by Portal Programas.com in the category "Best growing potential software". In the name of the whole Chamilo community, we want to thank PortalProgramas for the financial support that represents this award and that will allow, for sure, that the Chamilo Association continues spreading the word about Chamilo all over the world.

Dear Chamilo user,

The year 2011 was a challenging year for the Chamilo organization: coordinating the release of new versions with many interesting features, further extending the association, getting the support of local user groups and further developing and exploring new technologies for the future.

In order to do this, in early 2011, the General Assembly defined a number of projects that should help us reach those objectives:

• Website rework
• Technical infrastructure (mailing, website, demo portals, free campus)
• Organisation of the Chamilo Users Day 2011,
• More added value for all association members
• Strengthening links to the OLPC project
• Develop local groups
• Get more open to new markets
• Extend and develop new end-user documentation
• Extend and develop new developer documentation
• SCORM Engine analysis
• Database profiling and stress testing
• A better marketing Plan

2011 is over now, and we are preparing for a new and exciting Chamilo year. It is time to evaluate what happened this year and express all the dreams and desires you have for the Chamilo software suite as well as the Chamilo association in 2012.

Your feedback will be included in the process of defining new projects during the General Assembly (9 March 2012). If you have been involved in promoting or improving the Chamilo environment over the last year, now's your chance to get more involved: tell us what you've done and ask to be included in the decision process by being accepted as an effective member!

So do not hesitate to let us know what you expect from the association and from the software in 2012 forward.

Send all your ideas and feedback back to communication@chamilo.org before January the 30th, 2012 or tweet us at @chamilo_news!

Kind Regards,

Board of Directors - Chamilo Association

Gemeenteplein 23 - 9090 Melle - Belgium

IBAN: BE 43 9794 3491 8501 | BIC: ARSPBE22

www.chamilo.org | info@chamilo.org

We have created a new webpage that aims to facilitate all users access to critical and relevant information. This process of offering a new website withouth loosing anything from the past website is a bit slow because it requeries that we supervise all the content and decide wich one  is still relevant and wich one it is not. So please be patient while we recover all teh contents from the old website. We are trying our best.

Chamilo 1.8.8.2 is out. This is the first completely stable version published since 1.8.7.1 last July 2010, and it was worth the wait!

Alongside a fully-functional certificates printing tool, you will find full-text indexing, mathematical editors, online image editing, online voice generation and voice recording features, PPT importation from 2007 versions of office suites, quizzes scenarization, radiographic exercises, better quizzes preview, copy of quizzes from one course to another, an improved social network and a batch of around 200 other little improvements, that make Chamilo really great to use.

The Chamilo Association announces the 1st International Chamilo Users Day to be held in Brussels (Belgium), Monday 10th of March 2011 (together with E-Learningday "Create and Share"). The aim of the Chamilo Users Day is to gather together users of Chamilo from around the world to share their experiences with peers and to learn from other people´s experiences.

On tuesday January 18, 2011 the Chamilo community organized it's first post Chamilo 2.0-release developers meeting, hosted by the Erasmus University College Brussels. With over 30 people attending it's one of the biggest meetings yet and an instant success. We're still working on the meeting report, but to get you in the mood, here are some pictures taken during the event:

Last 18th of december a lot of users got together to share best practices and examples around Chamilo LMS. The end of the year virtual gathering was recorded by the offical Chamilo provider beeznest and thus now you can enjoy the videos of the different sessions if you didn´t have the time to follow them live.

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.

A little after a month of the release of the second Chamilo 2.0 beta the entire development team and community proudly present the Chamilo 2.0 Release Candidate. As we get ever closer to our final release, in this past month, we have been focusing on tackling some final structural problems, translations, additional external repository managers and many small (and not so small) fixes in terms of bugs, usability, layout and mini-features.

Highlights of this release candidate:

• Introduction of namespaces and move to PHP 5.3
• Optimization of the Chamilo file structure
  
• Even more external repository managers: Soundcloud, Vimeo, Photobucket, etc.
• Serious performance improvements
• Various fixes for visual inconsistencies
• Countless bugfixes and other small improvements

Download the release candidate now from our download page.