AC&S Ltd

What is ILIAS?

Ilias is an open source learning management system. It is a complete system to be used on a web server to create, display and track many forms of e-learning/computer based training and also utilise many related web 2.0 technologies.

ILIAS website

Why have we chosen to use ILIAS?

Besides it being full featured and able to fulfil most requirements of an LMS, the main reason for us is the free open source licence. This gives us the flexibility to change anything we need to and the only cost we pass on to clients is any customizing and development time on our part. There’s no cost to pass on for the LMS itself. We believe that makes it a more competitive choice. There are other open source alternatives but ILIAS is the only SCORM certified one currently and it covers all the features we’ve required and been most easily customizable.

What can ILIAS do?

ILIAS is a brilliant web based delivery platform for e-learning lessons and courses developed in pretty much any tool you can think of. ILIAS even has it’s own inbuilt lesson development (SCORM compliant) tools.

Personal Desktop:

This isn’t merely a one way “broadcast” of lessons. Each user can have various individual tracked data such as lessons attempted, scores achieved in quizzes, prerequisite conditions etc.

Message asking user by name whether to resume a lesson where last exited:

From an educator/trainer’s point of view there are endless ways to review test scores, time taken for lessons, attempts made etc. Also automatic issuing of certificates, multiple methods of communication (messaging, email, forums, webcasts), wikis, surveys.

What does our work with ILIAS consist of?

There are two main things that our work and time consists of with regards to ILIAS:

1. Installation

ILIAS is a php/mySQL based package (since version 4.0.0 it also will also work with Oracle databases), so installing can vary depending on whether it requires integrating with an existing php/mySQL web server set up or setting up a dedicated server/host from scratch. We’ve installed it successfully many times on both Linux and Windows based servers. Each has presented it’s own challenges depending on version of ILIAS, Linux flavour/version, XAMPP version, PHP version etc. At time of writing ILIAS is at version 4.0.2.

2. Customizing

The bulk of time/work may be customizing/skinning ILIAS to fit into a client’s requirements (this requires text, code, graphics and ILIAS setting changes):

We have developed our own documentation for customizing since many things have changed in the internal workings of ILIAS since version 4 and we’ve had to determine how to change and what to change for any particular desired effect and we should now be able to drastically change the appearance of an ILIAS installation to suit a client’s individual needs.

3. Other

Of course there’s all sorts of other bits and pieces we’ve done from ensuring lessons integrate properly (SCORM compliance of ILIAS is important here) with lessons we develop ourselves (created in anything e.g. Authorware, Xerte, Flash), to creating bespoke php code (e.g. a Certificate Request program) when a very specific feature isn’t yet available for ILIAS. And also supporting the Admin and feature use of the ILIAS application itself.

Andrew

Tags: customizing, e-learning, ilias, learning management system, mysql, oracle, php, web 2.0

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 15:18 and is filed under Learning Management Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.