Chamilo User Day en Latinoamérica Mayo 2013

Videoconferencia nativa en el navegador con WebRTC

WebRTC (Comunicaciones en Tiempo Real para la Web) está madurando muy rápido. Para los muy interesados y algo pacientes, este vídeo de Google I/O 2012 les interesará un montón!

Para los que, como nosotros, están interesados en lo que se puede hacer con esto y Chamilo LMS, pues queda claro que muchísimo.

A partir de la red social de Chamilo, uno se podría directamente conectar a otro usuario por videoconferencia sin sobrecargar el servidor de Chamilo (conexión directa). Con IPv6 y un poco de multicast, podríamos tener un solo docente dictando a miles de estudiantes en simultáneo sin necesidad de integración de Ustream, Livestream, JustinTV ni nada de esto.

Para probar WebRTC con la videoconferencia en Firefox en Ubuntu *hoy*, aquí va un pequeño procedimiento a seguir en el navegador para, primero, instalar una versión inestable de Firefox nocturno (versión 21 al momento de escribir estas líneas) en paralelo a su versión actual (cortesía de otro blog):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox-trunk

Después de esto, un enlace “Navegador Web Nightly” aparecerá en el menú de Ubuntu: Aplicaciones > Internet > Navegador Web Nightly.

Una vez lanzada esta versión, ir aquí con esta nueva versión. Al momento de escribir estas líneas, los demos son un poco inestables todavía, pero la idea es que por lo menos uno puede verificar que su webcam y su microfono están tomados en cuenta por los distintos demos disponibles.

Pues ahí va… El futuro de Chamilo tiene videoconferencia como Skype integrada al navegador (si tienes el buen navegador)!

Aprendizaje basado en el funcionamiento del cerebro

Según investigaciones en el ámbito de como el cerebro aprende (“Brain-Based Learning”, por On Purpose Associates, 2004), los siguientes elementos son válidos para un mejor aprendizaje:

1. El cerebro puede encargarse de varias actividades a la vez (por ejemplo, escuchar y oler)
2. El aprendizaje implica todo el cuerpo
3. La búsqueda del sentido de las cosas es inato y viene por aplicación de patrones
4. Las emociones son críticas para la generación de patrones
5. El cerebro procesa el todo y las partes en simultáneo
6. El aprendizaje involucra la atención concentrada y la percepción periférica
7. El aprendizaje involucra procesos conscientes e inconscientes
8. Tenemos dos tipos de memoria: espacial y “rote” (memoria por repetición sin ser necesario el entendimiento)
9. El aprendizaje y el entendimiento se mejoran si los hechos están insertados en memoria espacial, o memoria natural
10. Los retos y las amenazas disminuyen la eficiencia del aprendizaje

Chamilo LMS favorece varios de estos elementos:

1. Chamilo permite el uso de varios medios (vídeos, audios, textos, imágenes y juegos) y facilita su elaboración por el docente (herramientas de dibujo, grabación y generación de audio, etc)
2. El docente puede fácilmente transmitir elementos de cursos que involucren el resto del cuerpo. El uso de Chamilo desde su casa permite a los alumnos practicar gestualmente sin el freno de la vergüenza
3. La integración de definiciones propias de vocabulario, incluyendo, por ejemplo, elementos históricos mediáticos, permite encontrar sentido en lo enseñado. Generar sentido y emociones depende altamente de la manera en la cual el docente decide presentar el contenido.
4. (idem punto 3)
5. La presentación de contenido de aprendizaje en formato de cursos (todo) con varias herramientas para temas específicos (partes) permite al cerebro trabajar sobre ambos contextos (global y parcial)
6. Presentar contenido que combine concentración y percepción es hecho factible por la facilidad con la cual Chamilo permite la integración de medios
7. (idem punto 6)
8. A través de la posibilidad, para Chamilo, de elaborar lecciones con mini-pruebas tras cada capítulo, se pueden “animar” las memorias espaciales y ote para cada tipo de contenido presentado. Típicamente, 5 páginas de texto/medios serán seguidas de una mini-prueba de 5 preguntas que asegura que el cerebro del estudiante se despierte al objetivo concreto del aprendizaje
9. (idem punto 8)
10. Por el uso de una herramienta de aprendizaje como Chamilo LMS, que permita el aprendizaje al ritmo personal del estudiante, se puede reducir las amnazas y el estrés y optimizar el ambiente de aprendizaje. El aprendizaje durante espacios temporales más tranquilos (en casa, de vacaciones, etc) permite la elaboración mental de conceptos más complejos y su respectivo aprendizaje. La capacidad, para Chamilo LMS, de funcionar en ambientes móviles, le permite fácilmente ser usado en cualquier situación.

Chamilo LMS es un sistema de gestión y distribución de cursos virtuales desarrollado, entre otros, por BeezNest. Se puede descargar en la página oficial de Chamilo. Puede contactar a BeezNest para una propuesta formal de implementación y asistencia en ventas@beeznest.com.

Chamilo 1.9.4 released, clear the way!

Today we release Chamilo 1.9.4, with a number of notable improvements in speed, usability and features, but you know… that’s nothing compared to what we’re preparing for version 1.10. We’ve got a pocket full of kryptonite ready to blow your eyes out this year, but let’s focus on 1.9.4 for now. You can download it from here: http://www.chamilo.org/en/download. The free campus will be upgraded, probably this week-end, to have everybody enjoying the improvements.

For this great release, I’d like to personally thank our AMAZING team. We’ve all been hard at work, and they deserve some praise. In particular, thanks to Julio, Yoselyn, Hubert, Jérémie, José, Laura, Noa and, of course, Michela for their efforts in all directions, helping Chamilo spread like crazy and helping build this brilliant piece of software that you’re probably downloading already. Many more people deserve thanks. They’ve all (I hope I didn’t forget anybody) figuring in the Chamilo 1.9.4 credits. My sincere apologies to the Chamilo translators for having failed once again to distinguish their contributions and thank them properly for that. You make Chamilo a better tool for your communities and this is invaluable!

You can find the full changelog of Chamilo 1.9.4, as always, on http://stable.chamilo.org/documentation/changelog.html, but if you prefer a short version, have it here:

• Teachers can now generate an export in PDF all the certificates of their students at once (and print them as one big file)
• Improvement to the attendances tool, allowing you to mark “late” students and warning you about overlaps
• Stylesheets can now be uploaded *and downloaded* directly from the admin page, so happy editing!
• Exercises now generate score reports by questions categories (nice!)
• You can now group questions by the same media resource (a large text, a video, etc)
• LP image is now shown as a starter icon on the course homepage if you want to
• You can now create student classes through CSV import
• General reports now show IP address to identify where this student was connecting from (you know… his exam seemed so good, for once…!?)
• Considerably improved learning path usability
• Single Sign On class has improved security with blocking per IP (or IP range) the Single Sign On origin
• Improved responsive design: better positionning of most blocks
• HTML5 support improvements
• WCAG improvements (alt/title tags and other stuff)
• SEO improvements: H1 and H2 tags reorganized
• BigBlueButton plugin improvements and fixes
• Fixed issues with IE9 (with and without compatibility mode) in exercises
• Fixed problem with accentuated chars in image zones question types
• Fixed issues with files upload in HTTPS
• Fixed XLS questions import
• Fixed courses copy bugs
• Translation to Tagalog

But 1.9.4 is just one step further from 1.9.0, with 1.10 looming in th background for the big leap. 1.9.6 should be ready in about two months from now (mid March?), with just around 50 issues to review and fix (which will give us plenty of time to look at other important Chamilo stuff), then 1.10 should come out somewhere around May (that’s a very wide guess). I don’t want to sell it too early, so you’ll just have to believe that what is coming is much more than what 1.9 was in comparison to 1.8. With 1.10, we should get a large foot into the large corporate environment scale, with Chamilo being used progressively by hundreds of thousands of users on a few portals, with more features, better efficiency (still) and a more reliable behaviour.

To match our ambitions, we’ve worked even harder so that Chamilo could now be automatically tested, documented, analyzed (and soon packaged) by our brand new Jenkins server at http://testing.chamilo.org. With this one, we’ll be able to optimize our review cycle, spending more time on important stuff, and less time fighting against undetected regressions. Including the new Symfony framework bits that we’ve been adding recently, Chamilo LMS (just that branch) has now about 1 million lines of code, which makes it a huge development project, so it was time for us to get armed with the proper weapons. Two new developers (maybe more) will soon be joining the team as well. Our previous projects have won us a long series of good relationships and we are on our way to grow, both as an association and as a group of companies. Talking about that, the association subscribed almost 50 new personal members last year, so if you’re interested, don’t hesitate to check out the guide on how to become a member.

Our crowdfunding portal is on its way too, so you’ll be able to show your support for a specific feature. More about this soon…

And finally, Chamilo certification exams will soon be updated to Chamilo 1.9.4. You can buy an exam attempt at https://shop.beeznest.com. The process is completely automated. Video courses will be available for sale soon too.

Want to have your own Chamilo 1.9.4 portal? Why not try Chamihost for free for 15 days?

Oh, by the way, today’s Chamilo’s 3rd birthday!

The amazing Chamilo project is warming up for 2013. Are you?

Funcionamiento de sesiones en Chamilo LMS 1.10

“Sesiones” es un término ambiguo, el problema siendo encontrarles un nombre adecuado para todos los usos. Algunos otros nombres son:

• Programas
• Programas académicos
• Periodos (aunque esta denominación es algo equivocada – existe otra noción que conviene más, que es la categoría de sesiones)
• Ciclo (de aprendizaje)
• Sección
• …

En realidad, las sesiones representan un periodo (generalmente limitado) de tiempo durante el cual un grupo de alumnos sigue uno o más cursos con el acompañamiento de un profesor designado para este curso durante este periodo. Por ello, en muchas ocasiones usamos en el pasado la representación siguiente

Sesiones

A la izquierda del diagrama, reconocemos el tríangulo clásico Profesor – Curso – Alumnos, y al centro del diágrama vemos que el mismo curso se encuentra con otro curso al mismo nivel, y con un responsable distinto del profesor quien elaboró el curso inicialmente.

En las versiones de Chamilo anteriores a la 1.10, disponíamos de 4 fechas para cada sesión:

• Inicio de acceso para los docentes
• Inicio de acceso para los alumnos
• Fin de acceso para los alumnos
• Fin de acceso para los docentes

La lógica de la diferencia de fin de acceso entre docentes y alumnos, es que el docente pueda preparar su curso (previamente a la apertura a los alumnos) y recuperar datos importantes (después delcierre para los alumnos), y que la sesión pueda “vencerse” y disaparecer del listado del docente, para que este pueda concentrarse sobre las sesiones más recientes.

En Chamilo LMS 1.10, agregamos dos fechas más, que son únicamente informativas. Así, tenemos las 6 fechas siguientes:

Fechas de sesiones

• Inicio de acceso para los docentes
• Inicio de acceso para los alumnos
• Inicio oficial del ciclo/programa/sesión
• Fin oficial del ciclo/programa/sesión
• Fin de acceso para los alumnos
• Fin de acceso para los docentes

En la imagen lateral, podemos ver, por ejemplo, la selección de las fechas siguientes:

• Inicio de acceso para los docentes: 2012-11-01 (un mes antes)
• Inicio de acceso para los alumnos: 2012-11-26 (unos días antes)
• Inicio oficial del ciclo/programa/sesión: 2012-12-01 (el día de lanzamiento, como visto en la lista de cursos)
• Fin oficial del ciclo/programa/sesión: 2012-12-31 (el día de cierre, como visto en la lista de cursos)
• Fin de acceso para los alumnos: 2013-01-04 (unos días después)
• Fin de acceso para los docentes: 2013-01-31 (un mes después)

Como si esto no fuera suficiente a nivel de flexibilidad, también es posible cambiar el comportamiento de las sesiones cuando pasó la fecha de cierre (para alumnos o para docentes).

Los tipos de acceso son:

• Acceso completo
• Acceso en lectura sola
• Sin acceso

El caso “Acceso completo” sirve para *ignorar* las fechas definidas. Por ejemplo, por un tiempo limitado, se reabre la sesión para el acceso de todos.

El caso “Acceso en lectura sola” permite acceder pasada la fecha de cierre. En este caso, la sesión aparece en la página “historial de cursos” y el acceso para consultas es posible pero no se puede participar más en ninguna herramienta de participación (foro, ejercicios, wiki, etc).

El caso “Sin acceso” cierra por completo el acceso a la sesión a partir de la fecha de cierre para el rol correspondiente. Por ejemplo, si soy alumno y estoy inscrito en la sesión que tiene como fecha de fin de acceso para alumnos el 04/01/2013, al pasar al 05/01/2013, disaparece esta sesión de mi lista. Tampoco se puede ver en mi historial de curso. El docente, no obstante, seguirá viéndola en su lista de cursos hasta el 31/01/2013.

BeezNest to launch cloud hosting for Chamilo LMS

At the beginning of December, BeezNest will be launching its new, low-cost cloud hosting service for Chamilo LMS 1.9. This will enable non-technical teachers to host their own Chamilo LMS portal by only completing a form and scheduling a monthly payment depending on the number of users subscribed to the platform.

We hope this will give teachers a greater commodity regarding their course material and will give a gentle push in the right direction for the improvement of educational methodologies, making it easier for them to put their contents online and keep track of their students’ progress.

This cloud hosting will respect the philosophy of free software by giving you full access to the application’s souce code.

More information about this very soon!

User’s mail: My Chamilo LMS is slow

Sir,
I am a user of Chamilo 1.8 as my Website is : http://www.team**.in and i am having about 1300 users registered on that portal
but i always face big problem with chamilo 1.8 that when i take test of all users on same day then it stops working.
chamilo 1.8 is not able to handle online users more than 40, so i am facing big problem right now.

Sir, i want to ask u that should i upgrade or use chamilo 2.1 so that i can handle up to 2000 users online at same time for better output.
or please give me the solution for my problem .

Waiting for your response!

Regards
M.K.

Our answer:

Hello Mandeep,

You can try Chamilo LCMS Connect 2.1 if you want, but:
- there is no working upgrade mechanism from Chamilo LMS (1.8, 1.9) to
Chamilo LCMS Connect (2.1, 3.1) at the moment
- Chamilo LCMS Connect 3.1 should be out in a few days now
- Chamilo LMS 1.8 is *much* lighter than Chamilo LCMS 2.1 as far as we
know, so upgrading would definitely not fix the weight problem.

Apart from that, you might be interested to know that:
- Chamilo LMS 1.9.2 will be released this week (but it is a bit heavier
than Chamilo 1.8)
- Chamilo LMS and Chamilo LCMS Connect have no real common point (apart
of the fact that they are managed by the same association and are LMS
platforms)
- there is an optimization guide in the documentation/ folder of Chamilo LMS. Please
read it and make sure you apply a few hints from there to your portal.
You might get great improvements in speed if you know a little bit of
optimization principles (for example showing the number of connected
users adds a massive load time to each page if you do not use any shared
memory variable caching)
- 1300 registered users shouldn’t be a problem. However, the number of
*simultaneous* users is really where the stress might come from. The
hardware you use for this site will be the issue if you use a virtual
machine with low resources, for example. Do not think of an LMS as a
blog or website: in an LMS, all the content has to be personalized,
which is much more difficult to optimize than a website, where the
content is the same for all users.

I’ve had a look at the reports for the homepage (can’t go further
without login) of http://www.team***.in/elms/ and it seems
alright (C-Rank without optimizations is rather good).

Taking a test for 1300 users simultaneously will
*obviously* put a lot of load on the database. You could reduce the load
by trying different settings, like having all questions on one page
instead of one question per page (because people will finish the exam at
different times and will only send one big SQL request at the end of the
test, which will hopefully be treated faster than one request every time
one single person answers one single question), or adding in-cache
indexes to your MySQL database but, most of all, you will need to have
a solid database behind your site (having it on a separate server to split
the load between php and MySQL might be a good idea).

Best regards,

Y.W.

E-learning quality evaluation methods

The written proceedings of the 2011′s International Conference on e-Learning in Serbia caught my eye with an article called “HYBRID MODEL FOR E-LEARNING QUALITY EVALUATION” by Suzana Savić, Miomir Stanković and Goran Janaćković, not actually for the hybrid model (although it has its merits), but mainly for listing projects analysing different aspects of e-learning quality (resulting in evaluation models) actually available right now, which I want to list here for later reference:

• Supporting Excellence in E-Learning (SEEL)
• Sustainable Environment for the Evaluation of Quality in E-Learning (SEEQUEL)
• The quality of e-learning: evaluation of training effectiveness and impact measures (Qual E-learning)
• The European Quality Observatory (EQO) Model: A Conceptual Model for Classification of Quality Approaches
• Quality, Interoperability and Standards in e-learning (QUIS)
• European University Quality in eLearning (UNIQUe)
• E-Quality in E-Learning Research Laboratory (EQUEL)
• Benchmarking of Virtual Campuses (BENVIC)
• Reffering Innovative Technologies and Solutions for Ubiquitous Learning (CHIRON)
• E-Learning Maturity Model (eMM) benchmarking

The article goes on reviewing those projects and the number of measurements they define, which should serve as a reference

Macro-scale benefits of e-learning on free software

There are many advantages of e-learning. Some of them are obvious to people who barely entered the education with technology world:

• Increased availability of learning content in time
• Increased availability of learning content in space
• Increased capacity to maintain and improve learning content
• Lower logistical costs than physical, in-class teaching
• Increased reach (due to not binding it to a physical place)

Providing or using e-learning with free software provides the following additional benefits:

• Ability to modify the application to your needs
• Ability to scale (up and out) without increasing licensing costs
• Ability to develop the local business by directing critical financial resources (otherwise spent in foreign licensing) to local manpower, developing both skills and wealth locally, even in rural areas
• Ability to avoid technology lock-up as data is and remains in your posession
• Ability to replicate the improvements or other modifications you have made and make other institutions benefit
• Ability to translate to any language (having a learning tool localized is very important for minorities)

All this is good, but when talking about macro-scale (a region, a country or the world), e-learning on free software provides you with incredible advantages which could really improve the way every person lives

• Ability to share knowledge and learning efforts cross-borders, which will increase understanding and thus reduce conflicts (free software will enable you to customize this knowledge sharing to what local communities really need)
• Ability to share resources, making it possible for experts to be virtual hosts in other organizations, spreading their knowledge
• Ability to evaluate massive amounts of learners, fast (and improve the educational system as a whole, instantly) and without fear of other parties controlling those results to whatever ends they might plan
• Ability to reduce centralization and develop all sub-parts of a specific geographical territory (even with only partial internet connectivity), through light optimizations taken in charge by the same people who face these challenges
• Ability to improve the role of teachers, making them re-take their role of leaders, showing the way instead of running after the clock to finish correcting their students’ assignments

There are many reasons why everyone should suggest the use of e-learning using free software, and these are the reasons why this is my expertise. I really believe in making the world a better place by using it. With Chamilo, we are already helping more than one million people around the world to get a better education at a lower cost and with control over their resources. Help us do the same, tell your institution (company, school, government) about Chamilo and try it!

Chamilo 1.9… getting back to 3 digits

We are currently approaching the 1.9 release of Chamilo. In the inner circles, it will be called 1.9.0 as it will be followed by one or two other bugfix releases.

During the past years, we started getting into details of 1.8.7.1, 1.8.8.4 etc. In my view, this was a bad decision. While it’s OK to have lots of number within the inner circle of developers (because it allows us to focus on the details), it is definitely confusing to the end user having to deal (mentally) with 4 digits in a version number.

We started going deeper in the version when the doubt was still present about the merge with Chamilo 2.0 (now “Chamilo LCMS”), to avoid confusing people and making it somewhat natural to expect a 1.9, then the move to 2.0. But this merge has now been postponed to two years from now, and the team of Chamilo LCMS now decided to name their new version “3.0″, so it doesn’t make any sense anymore for us to remain stuck in the normal numbering.

In fact, most people just call the 1.8.8.4 “Chamilo 1.8″, or just “Chamilo 8″. And they should! It makes no sense to be using so many numbers to identify a version before the public.

So we decided to get back to a simple 2-digits number (commercially) and a 3-digits number for the fixes. 1.9 will be released before the end of the month, while 1.9.2 should be out in a month or so in case we find any remaining bug.