Documentation

If you want to join us on creating manuals and materials to help others use Chamilo, go to the contact page and send us a message. We will be glad to hear from you! Thanks.

Translate

A short manual to work with the Chamilo Translation Tool is now available! You can download it here: http://www.chamilo.org/files/translate_chamilo_org.pdf

Teacher manual for Chamilo 1.8.8.4

Chamilo Teacher Guide in English: http://chamilo.googlecode.com/files/Chamilo-Teacher-Guide-1.8.8.4-en.pdf

Guide Chamilo pour enseignants, en français: http://chamilo.googlecode.com/files/Chamilo-Guide-Enseignant-1.8.8.4-fr.pdf

Admin manual for Chamilo 1.8.8.4

Chamilo Admin Guide in English: http://chamilo.googlecode.com/files/Chamilo-Admin-Guide-1.8.8.4-en.pdf

Guide Chamilo pour administrateurs, en français: http://chamilo.googlecode.com/files/Chamilo-Guide-Administrateur-1.8.8.4-fr.pdf

Teacher manual for Chamilo 1.8.7 (French only)

http://support.chamilo.org/attachments/969/chamilo-guide-utilisation-enseignants.pdf

Admin manual for Chamilo 1.8.7 (French only)

http://support.chamilo.org/attachments/968/chamilo-guide-utilisation-administrateur.pdf

Chamilo 2 Documentation

All available user and technical documentation in both English and Dutch can be found on the Chamilo 2 community page.

A lot of general documentation for developers is available on Google Drive. Join our team to get access. Get a taste by reading the following documents:

Opening Pandora's Box (46 pages) on how the platform connects to external repositories such as Google Drive, Flickr, Picasa, Youtube and many more.
To Have and Have Not (28 pages) on rights management
Namespaces: The Final Frontier (30 pages) on how the file system is structured.

Website edition

If you would like to translate this website in a new language or feel it lacks a bit of dynamism in your own language, please, don't hesitate to drop us an e-mail and let yourself know. We will gladly welcome you inside the team.

If you are going to contribute as a translator or a moderator on this website, you should know a few tricks for the job:

Always put a short URL for each content. This allows for better SEO and makes it much more ordered and clear when referencing from another website.
For example: nieuws/chamilo-reeds-twee-maanden for Dutch, breves/chamilo-deux-mois-deja for French. The system manages translations by itself, no need to put a language prefix if you are already editing the news in the right language.
The "nieuws" or "breves", or "news" prefix allows to order things. Not putting a prefixing slash allow us to possibly change the domain one day without losses, and the completely literal, "-" separated URL allows for better indexing.

These rules work out for all languages, of course.

Fact sheet

Data taken from http://support.chamilo.org/projects/chamilo-18/wiki/Chamilo_187_-_Features

Chamilo 1.8.7 or its close predecessors have been tested without major influence on the server load with:

800 simultaneously connected users (in a 240 seconds timeframe)
32,000 courses
229,000 registered users
35,000 connexions per day

Current http://campus.chamilo.org has ...

19,600 registered users
300 simultaneously connnected users (120 seconds timeframe)
3,500 courses
... and runs on ...
2 x Intel Xeon Dual-Core 5130
2GB RAM
250GB SATA HDD
X7DBN Motherboard
5TB / month bandwidth

The videoconference tool has been tested on a virtual machine with 300MB of RAM with 20 people connected simultaneously and has shown nor defect nor excessive load. It has also been tested with up to 45 concurrent users inside the same institution and has proven to be a bit slow and add audio delay. This was mostly due to the number of computers in the same network, making the work difficult for the streaming server in terms of address translations.

It is also estimated that the practical limits for a quad-core processor with 8GB of RAM and a ZFS-type file system (given small interface customizations) would be:

1 000 000 users registered
5000 simultaneously connected users (with a time window of 60 seconds)
32 000 courses
millions of sessions

Learning more about Chamilo

There is already a considerable amount of resources available on the web about Chamilo, so we'll try to be as exhaustive and organized as possible...

Pedagogical aspects

Chamilo is implemented in a way that allows the teacher to choose between a series of pedagogical methodologies, one of which is social constructivism.
The Chamilo software is built in a way that lets the teacher take control and easily "disappear" to let the content take its true place inside the learner's experience
Chamilo has a growing list of documentation resources available on content aggregation websites: youtube, slideshare, twitter, vimeo, ...
See teacher and admin manuals on our documentation page...
Chamilo is used among learners from 6 years old to 80 years old, within public and private structures, within educational or corporate institutions

International aspects

Chamilo is now used in production in more than 25 countries: http://version.chamilo.org/map/map.php
Chamilo is now used by more than 500,000 users around the world: http://version.chamilo.org/community.php
Chamilo is constantly developed by a team of around 20 developers worldwide: https://www.ohloh.net/p/compare?metric=Contributors&project_0=Dokeos&project_1=Moodle&project_2=Chamilo (charts generally affected by European holidays)
Chamilo inherited most of the professional and experienced workforce of its predecessor: http://www.chamilo.org/about-chamilo
Chamilo has translations opened for 55 languages, and about 25 of them are more than 80% complete. Simplified Chinese has been recently reviewed by a Chinese translator

Corporate productivity aspects

Knowing most training sessions cost directly about 1000€/day in Europe, and considering the logistics to gather a team of 10 efficient employees, the following declaration takes a huge meaning in terms of corporate productivity: "Chamilo is considerably easier to teach, generating a difference from 40 to 4 hours between Moodle and Chamilo training for our teachers", Igor Yepes, Director of distance learning, Universidad do Tocantins
"Easier access to valuable course contents generates lower drop rates for distance learners, which means better goals reaching rates in corporate training", Yannick Warnier, ICT Director, BeezNest Belgium SPRL
Chamilo offers online authoring tool, reducing the cost of building new content. Import your existing content, add a 10-questions test and you've got a new self-evaluating course ready in an hour

Technical aspects

Relational database model (partially outdated): http://www.dokeos.com/wiki/index.php/Database_schema_1.8.5
Quick reference sheets for new developers: http://beeznest.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/chamilo-developers-quick-reference-sheets/
Chamilo is reviewed once a year by a security cracker to improve its security against attacks on the web. New contributors are coached during their first weeks to teach them (between other things) how to provide secure code.
Chamilo receives about one new important contribution from a new source every two months. The current development teams take in charge the revision and integration of the code into Chamilo.
The Chamilo development teams (one for 1.x, one for 2.x) are very open about their processes, and you can always find accurate, up-to-date information on our project management system: http://support.chamilo.org
Chamilo is Open Source, under the GNU/GPLv3 license, and is protected by a non-profit association, which means it is literally impossible for any company to take property of the project and close it down. But it also means you are free to develop your own extensions or improvements, and share it (or not) with the community as long as you comply with the licensing
The Chamilo association provides a rewarding system to encourage businesses to contribute code to the project (more info on this in the membership registration procedure description)
Chamilo can easily be combined with existing IT infrastructure. We have a proven track record of integrating it with homemade applications, Oracle or IBM DB2 databases, directories (e.g. LDAP), etc...