www.chamilo.org

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:

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.

Chamilo 2.0 is brand-new, right? Kind off. Like any new or completely reworked product it just takes a while for it to be finished. Chamilo 2.0 has been evolving almost organically for the better part of, at least, four years now and in that time plenty of things have changed. Anno 2006 a rather sizeable part of the PHP community was still dabbling in PHP4, which has somewhat limited possibilities for object oriented development.

Even though we used PHP5 from that start, this new version was still far from perfect. (which is still the case at the moment this document is being compiled as far as we are concerned) It did however allow us to implement a serious number of technical improvements and new concepts in the project. One of the cornerstones of Chamilo 2.0, at least technically speaking, would be its modularity and several steps were undertaken to make the system modular and per definition extensible. Functionality was split across several “core” applications, libraries and optional (installable) applications.

The courses-application would eventually become one of these so-called “optional” applications. Layout and translations were equally modular and could easily be added if and when necessary. Content objects could be installed (or removed) as needed and the system was intelligent enough to allow for connections between several optional applications. In short: four years of development resulted in a general kind of file structure created by consensus between the active developers, improving things as they went along and whenever deemed necessary for the greater good.

Was it perfect? By no means, but it  was very workable and we kept on thinking about future ways to improve things. Most ideas were pushed back because of more pressing concerns and, more importantly, because they, or so we thought, were nothing more than cosmetic changes with little added value in terms of ease of development. It was 2009 and all was well, or was it?

One summer day in 2009 the joyful bunch known as the PHP Group, released PHP 5.3 and even though all was still well, we could see a storm coming from the east. Time to gather our fellowship of developers, assess the strength of the enemy and come up with a battle plan. The start of the second age?

Download the complete 30-page article / document now and find out how and why Chamilo 2.0 is structured the way it is.

It's been a few months since the release of the first Chamilo 2.0 beta and the feedback so far has been great. We're really pleased to see that the beta package was downloaded over 950 times. The release of the beta also provided us with a wealth of valuable feedback and bug reports. Tons of bugs were fixed and some new functionality was added. So after a few months more of intensive programming, a few more Chamilo "code sprints" and several meetings, the Chamilo 2.0 development team and the entire Chamilo Community are very pleased to announce the release of Chamilo 2.0 beta 2! Another small step towards the final release of Chamilo 2.0: the world's best e-learning and collaboration software.

Highlights of this second beta release:

• Completely reworked migration
• External repository managers: YouTube, MediaMosa, Flickr, GoogleDocs, etc.
• Improved rights management to facilitate, among others, sharing of content objects
• Lots of refactoring, improving stability and reusability of key components and applications
• Countless bugfixes

...and much more.

Download it now from our download page or try it on http://beta.chamilo.org

The importance of audiovisual media can hardly be underestimated. Not only is it an essential tool for distance learning, but it can also enrich and supplement traditional learning in a variety of ways. Getting audio and video from Chamilo (or many other platforms) to the end-user often proves to be difficult to say the least. Tools like YouTube, Vimeo and Dailymotion are nice, but are often too limited in an educational context. Even though Chamilo 2.0 will be supporting full integration of sites like YouTube (check the article Opening Pandora's Box: Chamilo 2.0 Repositories), users will more then likely want things which are not possible on the aforementioned platforms.

So what's the alternative? Setting up your own streaming media platform of course. This way you control the content yourself and you can allow people to add content which might be approved for educational viewing but not for public viewing. One such platform is Opencast Matterhorn, which released it's first stable version earlier this month.

Matterhorn is an open-source platform that aims to be the ultimate platform to support educational audio and video. Via Matterhorn users will be able to schedule lecture recordings, add existing content from a variety of sources and distribute that content to different channels. Channels right now include an embeddable streaming video player, YouTube and iTunesU.

On top of all that Matterhorn works with so called workflows which allow you to define templates of how content should be made available. E.g. as a Flash movie, a high-resolution download and a burnable DVD which will play on a standalone player. The sky is more or less the limit.

Management of the platform is possible by means of an extremely extensive set of REST webservices and gives us the perfect opportunity to integrate Opencast Matterhorn with Chamilo 2.0. The team over at Erasmus University College Brussels is currently analyzing both Matterhorn and the different ways we can integrate it with Chamilo 2.0. Stay tuned for a report detailing the results of that analysis.

Even though Matterhorn is still a relatively young project, it's already backed by a very impressive community which contains some of the leading educational institutions in the world. (UC Berkeley, Cambridge, Indiana U, ETH Zurich, ...)

If you want to learn more about Opencast Matterhorn, visit http://www.opencastproject.org/ for more information on every aspect of the project, ranging from architecture over usage to development and implementation.

User account control, (digital) rights management, access control, credentials verification ... It hardly matters what you call it, it’s one of those annoying realities of life. In the ideal world there would be no need to check any kind of access rights, but since that utopia is still more or less a dream, we need a system. What does “the” system have to know?

• Who are you?
• Where are you?
• What do you want to do?

The reply is simple enough; it can be reduced to the most basic components a computer can understand:  a simple 0 or 1, true or false. For the humans among you that would be a “go ahead” or “no can do, buster”.
Sounds easy enough, right? Wrong. The theory of it all might be deceivingly easy, but in reality rights management is a combination of complex (hierarchical) structures, inheritance, locks, algorithms and last but not least: frustrated users. Because of the sheer complexity and scale of such systems it’s often a nightmare to maintain and an even bigger nightmare to set up or implement.

Download the complete 28-page article / document now and find out about the what, why and how of external repository integration in Chamilo 2.0.

re•pos•i•tor•y
[ri-poz-i-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee]
–noun, plural -tor•ies.
1.    a receptacle or place where things are deposited, stored, or offered for sale: a repository for discarded clothing.
2.    an abundant source or supply; storehouse: a repository of information.

So there you have it: a place where information is deposited. Repositories are ancient, there’s nothing new about them. Mankind has been gathering and storing knowledge ever since they realized they can do things which no other critter on this planet can do (for now). Some of these repositories have taken on almost legendary proportions like e.g. the library of Alexandria, that famous repository of knowledge of the ancient world. For centuries though, such repositories were only accessible for a select group of people: scholars, nobility, clergy, etc. After all knowledge is power and quite a few people didn’t exactly feel like sharing that power.

But let’s flash-forward in time just a little bit, to the 20th century to be somewhat more exact. The “microcomputer” was born, which opened up a multitude of options concerning the sharing of knowledge. But unless you went around exchanging a diverse selection of ever more exotic media to get knowledge from one computer to another, sharing knowledge was still cumbersome. That turned out to be a minor obstacle though. We can’t share information between computers? Well, then let’s hook them up in one big global network. Anno 2010 we call this the “internet”.

Coming up with a global (no pun intended) definition of the internet is difficult to say the least. For the sake of simplicity and to keep things confined to the context of this article its best regarded as an almost infinite repository of knowledge. There are the obvious repositories like Wikipedia  and YouTube, but also things like the BBC News  website, a local broadcaster’s television guide, etc.

There’s thousands of ways we can use these repositories to share information, but because of that global information highway at least we can do it with relative ease. At the same time we risk flooding people with enormous amounts of information which might be irrelevant in their specific case. So we built repositories on top of repositories to facilitate our quest for that particular piece of knowledge. Google  is just one the many examples of super-repositories out there. It “knows” a lot of things about an even bigger amount of websites, thus making it easier for us to find that which we are looking for. At least in theory.

Download the complete 46-page article / document now and find out about the what, why and how of external repository integration in Chamilo 2.0.
 

On July 7, 2010 the Chamilo 2.0 development team met in Ghent (Belgium) to discuss the current status of the project and the plans we have for the future, as well as the pending release of Chamilo 2.0 itself.

First of all there are some important dates we would like to share with you, so you all have something to look forward too:

• August 18 & 19: "Chamilo 2.0 Sprint" focusing on coding, documentation, testing and translations. The sprint will be organized in Ghent.
• October 18: Release of the second Chamilo 2.0 Beta
• November 22: Release of the first Chamilo 2.0 Release Candidate

After the first release candidate (or "golden master" for the Apple afficionados) things might go pretty fast as it has the potential to be the final product, ready to release unless fatal bugs emerge. So stay tuned for these releases / packages, because we'll need your help to make sure everything is tested as well as possible.

Selected highlights from the progress report:

• The Chamilo Package Manager already allowed us to install seperate so called packages or modules. However, considering the modular nature of the platform, update functionality is an absolute necessity. One might very well have version 1.0 of the repository installed, version 1.5 of the courses application, etc. ... and you should be able to update each and every one of them seperately. That is, as long as their dependencies are not conflicting. On top of all that the installation of our content objects was completely seperated from the repository installation. This now allows you to do "extra" things for your content object, one of them being the automatic installation of example objects into a user's repository.
• During the previous Chamilo 2.0 Code Sprint the architecture of the course tools was completely rewritten to allow for more flexibility and at the same time generalizing base functionality across all tools. One of the main advantages right now is the possibility to list course publications in several different ways. Previously most tools were limited to a specific view, e.g. a list for announcements, a table for assessments, etc. Implementing extra views implied adding a lot of extra code even though the idea was the same everywhere. To facilitate this process the so called renderer has been abstracted to provide several views by default: table, list, gallery table and slideshow. Enabling them for a specific tool is just a matter of listing them in that tool's allowed views array.
• A lot of work was done on a multitude of applications: surveys, portfolio, internship organizer, iCal parser, gradebook, peer assessment, reporting, a Wikipedia-like view for our wikis and finally a lot of general layout enhancements
• Nowadays a lot of content is hosted externally using services like YouTube, Flickr, Google Docs, etc. On top of that several open standards exist to connect to an extensive array of external repositories. The project desperately needed a generic way to connect with these external services. (external from a platform point-of-view) Several steps were already taken in the past to make this possible. The team of the university of Geneva implemented a connection with the Swiss educational Fedora repository and over at Erasmus we implemented a YouTube / streaming media manager to connect to several streaming servers. Now that these features have been merged and the architecture has been sufficiently abstracted we can, at least in theory, support an unlimited number of services directly from our Chamilo 2.0 repository. Currently supported are: YouTube, MediaMosa (developed by the VUB team), Flickr and Google Docs ... and plenty more connectors are on their way. Stay tuned for a follow-up post expanding on this subject.
• The team at Hogeschool Gent completely refactored the migration application. An essential component as people are somewhat unlikely to start from scratch when migrating to Chamilo 2.0. The new architecture is lightweight, easier to use and implement (for those of you who want to write an extension to migrate from other, unnamed, LMSes to Chamilo 2.0).

Selected highlights from the To Do list:

• Even more migration extensions and external repository managers
• Extensive implementation of the Chamilo 2.0 rights management
• Several applications are under development: student tracking system, campus plugin, assessment, competences, gradebook
• Checking DBMS-support (including but not limited to PostgreSQL)
• A quick starter's guide for developers being written by the team from Hogeschool Gent
• A complete reference manual for developers being written by the Erasmus team

For a complete overview, check the following documents:

• Progress report, listing what has been done since the previous developers meeting
• "On the horizon" (To Do list), listing what still needs to be done
• Technical documentation to accompany the progress report and documenting several new features and/or major changes