On the Criticality of Learning Management System

I’m often surprised at the little importance large education institutions put on their Learning Management Systems (LMS). Many times, after years of starting a modest pilot and slowly convincing all the people involved, institutions find themselves in a situation in which students (and sometimes teachers, but rarely the institution itself) drive the development of the LMS by demanding for changes.

Students, of course, see it as a way to get better, more ubiquitous access to their course material, to practice more without the need of the teacher, to get feedback faster, etc. Sometimes students feel more confident facing a computer than they would do in class.
Anyway, expectations increase and the institution has to follow or, sometimes, lead this evolution.

However, where the “mild” integration might have been slow in classical educational institutions, there is one crucial step where institutions *have* to make sure everything goes right: the move to a critical LMS integration as fast as their end-users require it.

A critical LMS is a service (not only the software, but also the team around it) on which you can rely to launch and follow training/teaching activities that are critical to your organization.

Obviously, teaching is critical for an educational institution, but it is not critical in the LMS sense if the LMS acts as an *extension* of the classroom courses.

It becomes critical when:

• students can access to the course *only* through the LMS
• the LMS serves to generate the students’ grades
• the LMS is used to generate reports on the activity of teachers or students
• it is expected to be online permanently, without interruptions of more than half an hour every week or so

If you compare it to other systems deemed “critical” by the IT department in an education institution, you should get this kind of table:

System	Must be up all time?	Critical information?	Must sustain high load?
ERP	Not really	Yes	No
Website	Yes	No	Not really
Library system	Not really	Not really	Not really
LMS	Yes	Yes	Yes

I’m sure some of these criteria can be discussed in specific situations, but when the LMS is used for the cases above (which is usually the case for any serious implementation), it *does* match all these criteria at the same time.

In each and everyone of these cases, it is necessary to be able to rely on a skilled team of specialists, that will be able to assess, intervene and report on any case that might cause some level of inconvenience to the students.

What this means is that a multi-dsiciplinary team of specialists will have to get involved in your project, and give you the power to do what you want and need. Building the team takes time, building and maintaining a high level of skills takes time, getting involved in a project takes time, and providing you with the best possible solution takes time, dedication and vision.

Many times, as the company behind the development of Chamilo LMS as a free software (we have high goals in terms of social responsability), we face this misunderstanding in the first step of our interaction with new customers.

The LMS is not *valued* by the IT department as it really should, and even less when it is based on free software. But software is just software, and although Chamilo LMS is in the top 3 best open source e-learning paltforms around, you can’t hope for a lot if your team doesn’t know how to manage it. And it’s not just a technical issue: dealing with online courses involve a combination of skills that you will need to have if you don’t have the right team to help you out:

• planning the tools you will use for interaction (videoconference, chat, forum, etc)
• knowing the limits of your students’ available technology (screen resolution, plugins, apps, etc)
• being able to design lightweight courses (bandwidth)
• knowing your students’ behaviour
• being able to plan (and take action) for a load increase on a server, ahead of a high-attendance online event
• being able to pinpoint reporting data to improve education methods
• and much more…

Understanding all this, if the budget for your institutions’ online education project is a 10th of its ERP’s system, it’s probably not going in the right direction, for its first step.

Only once the institution has understood the criticality of their LMS and how it will affect their institution’s image and efficiency, the project can start in the right environment.

Learning Management Systems are critical, not only for educational institutions. They represent a very unique tool that is both desired and required to improve the efficiency of teaching, learning and managing skills. Don’t let it fail. Make sure everybody understands what a LMS is and how useful it will be, and your organization will thrive into the 21st century!

Chamilo LMS

Chamilo LMS is a web-based learning management system focused on usability. It is developed and published under the GNU/GPLv3 license, which allows anyone to use, analyse, modify and distribute copies and modified copies of the software. In its first 4 years of existence, Chamilo LMS has been granted several software prizes and has grown from a community of 10 developers to a community of 9 million users worldwide.

Chamilo allows you to create courses, manage administrators, teachers, students and other typical roles for organizations or departments focused on training. It is suitable for academical, corporate, associative and personal environments.

The BeezNest group

BeezNest is the company behind most of the developments in Chamilo LMS. It specializes in analysis, development and support of e-learning projects in about 40 countries, with offices and collaborators in Belgium, France, Spain, Germany, the UK, Peru and Mexico. Projects managed by BeezNest deal with portals from 100 to 680,000 students, worldwide. It deals with every aspect of e-learning projects, from analysis, to hosting, platform developments, training, online courses building, to data analysis. All you need but marketing (which it prefers leaving to its customers).

Contact BeezNest at info@beeznest.com

Certifícate como administrador de E-learning con Chamilo LMS

Mayor información: https://www.beeznest.com/curso-chamilo/index.html

Correo de lectores – Desarrollo de modelo de negocios

Un lector nos escribe:

“Queria hacerte una pregunta sobre los modelos de comercializacion para el chamilo, ya que conozco una compañia de un amigo, que quiere distribuir chamilo pero no bajo la licencia GPL. Queria saber si la empresa BeezNest, tiene algun modelo de comercializacion alternativo para el Chamilo tipo open source, licencia BSD o alguno similar en donde el cliente pague una licencia por el uso del sistema y que el codigo fuente sea opcional entregarlo.”

Mi respuesta:

“Hola estimado,

Chamilo *no se puede* distribuir bajo ninguna otra licencia que GNU/GPLv3 o superior. Es una infracción legal tratar de hacerlo de otro
modo, así que te recomiendo sugieres a tu amigo verificar sus derechos según la licencia.

Por lo tanto, tratando de modificar este modelo, tu amigo se transformaría automáticamente en un enemigo del proyecto Chamilo, lo que dudo que quiera hacer. Si desea desarrollar un modelo de este tipo, deberá apuntar a soluciones no libres, tipo e-ducativa, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, e-Doceo, etc. No se puede obtener los beneficios de un producto de software libre (por ejemplo en este caso actuar de manera independiente) y al mismo tiempo los de un producto de software privativo (en este caso vender la licencia).

Queda terminadamente prohibido por la licencia. Eso es para el aviso importante (me hizo abrir los ojos bien grandes lo que leí).

De otro lado, el proyecto Chamilo es un proyecto de software libre radical: no acepta ninguna parte que no esté bajo licencia de software libre. Acepta la inclusión de otras licencias consideradas de software libre y compatibles con GNU/GPLv3 según la Free Software Foundation, pero su calidad surge de esta visión radical: la educación no puede estar frenada por asuntos comerciales!

Aun así, BeezNest basa su modelo de negocio sobre Chamilo gracias a la provisión de servicios de distintos niveles a sus clientes, los cuales
nunca impactan el proyecto software mismo de manera negativa:

* soporte
* instalación
* capacitación
* desarrollo (la totalidad de los útiles para el público se contribuye al proyecto)
* consultoría
* diseño e implementación de infraestructura
”

Y tu, que opinas? La parte legal es estricta, pero te parece que Chamilo es demasiado radical?

Porque cobramos por media hora?

Para las empresas que recién se lanzan en temas de sopoprte en el mundo del software, y para nuestros clientes que quizás se preguntan porqué cobramos un mínimo de media hora por intervención, me gustaría explicar un poco mejor lo que hacemos.

Nuestro negocio, básicamente, es desarrollar sistemas de información (en particular Chamilo, Drupal y Dolibarr) y dar soporte sobre ellos (esto incluye también cuidar los servidores que los alojan). Toda esta actividad radica en los servicios “humanos” de personas altamente calificadas para brindar estos servicios a quien los necesiten.

Para definirlo de forma simplística, alquilamos actividad cerebral, es decir que damos acceso a nuestros clientes a mentes brillantes para que resuelvan problemas para ellos, y les permitimos alquilar estas mentes brillantes solo cuando las necesiten.

Por lo tanto, también estamos tomando una gran cantidad de riesgo al poner estas mentes brillantes a su disposición (si nadie las quiere por un tiempo, tenemos que seguir asgurando sus ingresos).

También pueden haber cantidades de discusiones sobre la manera en la cual un cierto problema es considerado resuelto o no, pues los problemas de software muchas veces se indican de forma interpretada, dando las impresiones personales de cada uno porque cada uno tiene circonstancias particulares y vive sus problemas de maneras distintas. Mucho de este trabajo no puede ser contabilizado sin generar frustraciones. Por lo tanto, el trabajo de nuestros responsables de soporte, responsables del diálogo con los clientes y de ser más explícitos para facilitar este diálogo, está contabilizado como parte del tiempo de resolución del problema.

Analizando el tiempo necesario para un ingeniero para resolver un problema, aparecen de forma más clara las razones por las cuales se considera un tiempo mínimo de atención. Estos son tiempos mínimos aproximados basados en la realidad de la mayoría de los casos que atendemos. Se considera (en este caso) que la ficha del cliente, indicando los accesos comunes al sistema del cliente ya fueron registrados:

• 60s: Lectura del correo/mensaje del cliente
• 240s: Registro de la incidencia (incluye: clasificación, designación de título claro que permitirá luego apoyarse en esta incidencia para cortar el tiempo de tratamiento de otras, indicación copiado-pegado del detalle del reporte por el cliente, asignación de las personas que deben estar al tanto de esta incidencia, asignación de un tiempo aproximado de resolución, asignación de un momento aproximado de entrega, definición de dependencias con otras incidencias, etc)
• 60s: Conexión al sistema del cliente (o a una copia local) y reproducción del problema
• 60s: Creación de nuevo contexto de prueba que permita reproducir la incidencia en un sistema que no afecte al cliente (para el tiempo de trabajo en este)
• 300s: Investigación y, quizás, resolución del problema (se trata de un tiempo mínimo, en caso de poder aprovechar a su máximo la experiencia de nuestros ingenieros, pero no son raros los casos en los cuales esta resolución pueda tomar más de 2h)
• 120s: Verificar, una última vez, que la corrección resolvió el problema
• 60s: Registrar el cambio en nuestros repositorios de historial para cada cliente – esto implica también vincularlo con el código de la incidencia y darle un comentario adecuado
• 180s: Reportar al cliente (y en la incidencia) sobre la resolución (o no) de la incidencia
• 120s: Terminar, reportar su tiempo consumido, tomar 1 minuto de relajación para pasar a otra tarea

En total, el tratamiento de una sola incidencia representa un trabajo mínimo de 20 minutos, y en promedio (con la resolución de temas más complejos) más de media hora.

Por esta razón, nos es imposible asegurar, en buenas condiciones de seriedad y concentración, asegurar un tiempo de intervención menor a 20 minutos.

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.

Déjà vu: SAP buys SuccessFactors, customers feel in danger

I’m always surprised at how large companies are taking their IT politics too easily, and then are surprised by what happens.

Today, Josh Bersin (of Bersin & Associates, a great guy to follow: @Josh_Bersin) published an article on the plans by SAP to buy SuccessFactors (probably the leader in employees performance management software, at least in terms of completeness), and the fact that some customer of SuccessFactors was worried about support for important features being dropped.

It’s just the same old stuff repeating over and over again, and it’s why BeezNest has been pushing open source development forward since its creation: One CANNOT rely on a single provider for critical IT infrastructure, even less when it offers a closed source software. When this provider dies, gets bought or otherwise changes direction, there will be nothing for you to do. At best, you’ll have a useless piece of software that you cannot upgrade, cannot fix, cannot improve, and on which you won’t be able to train people.

Using, supporting and co-developing an open source solution would ensure you’d always be able to take ownership of the software and/or find another provider willing to take over the task of maintaining the software. In the worst case scenario, if you find yourself with a bad provider, you’ll most probably be able to find another one or to migrate to another system, because most open source software uses open standards, so migrating your data is just about reading the docs and executing a simple migration.

As BeezNest starts developing its employee management software development skills in the next version of Chamilo LMS, I find it slightly frustrating to find myself aiming at medium-sized companies while our solution fits the larger ones, and with only 30% of the annual budget companies spend on these closed solutions, we could reach a similar level very quickly with open solutions. It certainly has something to do with the fact that we are not very present on the US market for now, and the US market is certainly the most active in employee management right now.

I hear many voices say that we, open source software providers, pretend to be capable of delivering large scale solutions when we are not. Think again. It’s pretty much like any company: there are reliable companies, and there are unreliable ones. Only the free software companies understand and adopt the way things change, much more so than conventional software companies. They are able to adapt quickly, are globally local and do not having the running costs of giant software businesses.

To them, I say we’ve already done the kind of things we pretend to be capable of, and that’s why we’re so sure about it. We’ve migrated companies and universities from proprietary software. We’ve made them save 100’s of thousands of dollars in closed software licenses and customized the software to their needs. We’ve also been able to do so improving our software regularly, in a sustainable fashion and at a tremendous scale (from 0 to 700,000 “public” users in just 18 months must be kind of a proof). Companies of up to 200,000 employees use our software for free too. Apparently our customers are quite happy about it. If you need a quote, send us an e-mail, I’d be pleased to have a skype conversation with you.

BeezNest is a company present in Belgium and Latin America, focused on the development of software and services based on free software. In the last 7 years, it has taken the leadership of the Chamilo LMS software and its ancestor, making it grow at a rapid pace amongst its free and non-free equivalents. BeezNest provides services to companies and universities in Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, New Caledonia, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela.

Chamilo LMS is a free software Learning Management System which empowers teachers and trainers with easy-to-use digital tools to increase the efficiency of their training and the availability of their training resources. With more then 700,000 people around the world using Chamilo, there remains only less than 25 countries which DO NOT use it. It is the first e-learning platform to have included a social network with friends and activity groups. It is highly internationalized, with translations to Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Vietnamese, Spanish, Quechua, French, English and many more languages. Chamilo can be tested freely at http://campus.chamilo.org

Diferencias Moodle-Chamilo

En nuestros correos de usuarios, recibimos la siguiente consulta que es frecuente entre nuestros futuros usuarios:

Hola Yanncik, una consulta.

La vez pasada me consultaron las diferencias entre moodle y chamilo. Por lo que he podido ver en moodle, ambos lms tienen los mismos módulos y las mismas funciones.

Qué tiene chamilo que lo diferencia de moodle?

Ahora… siempre es difícil responder a esta conulta porque varía bastante de una versión a la otra, pero en fecha de Junio del 2011 y comparando Chamilo 1.8.8.2 con Moodle 1.9 y Moodle 2.0, podemos decir lo siguiente (de forma muy resumida)

Mi respuesta va así:

Estimado usuario,

Los dos sistemas son valiosos, pero según el uso, podría querer usar/recomendar el uno o el otro. Es más fácil definir lo que hay en Chamilo, que de decir lo que no hay. La diferencia viene a la sencillez de instalación y de uso, y lo que está incluido (y soportado) desde un inicio. Siempre recalco la sencillez de uso. Ciertos usuarios nos reportan hasta un factor 5 de sencillez de uso frente a Moodle (8h de capacitación necesarias en Chamilo contra 40h en Moodle). Moodle 2.0 no arregla nada de usabilidad, según nuestros primeros reportes de usuarios.

En Chamilo, desde el inicio, encontrarás:
– hojas de asistencia
– un sistema de evaluación / objetivos pedagógicos / certificados (con generación de certificados a imprimir)
– un plugin para videoconferencia con BigBlueButton (solo falta instalar BigBlueButton o vincular Chamilo con una instalación existente a través de 3 parámetros)
– un panel de control para los administradores (seguimiento)
– una red social con creación de grupos de interés
– la gestión de sesiones/ciclos/periodos/promociones/carreras (toda la estructura de formación académica o, renombrada con otros términos, corporativa)
– sistema de escenarización de ejercicios
– indexación fulltext
– un excelente soporte del idioma español
– la posibilidad de redefinir los términos de interfaz a partir de la interfaz (web) de administración
y una serie de cositas más del nivel de herramientas prácticas:

– text to speech (conversión de texto a voz)
– edición de imágenes tipo Photoshop(tm)
– edición de diagramas SVG tipo Inkscape
– grabación de voz (con Nanogong)
– soporte de Google Maps (previa instalación de una llave API de Google Maps)
– más sencillez en general en la manipulación de los objetos

Moodle tiene de notable:
– más formatos de importación/exportación (para ejercicios y lecciones)
– una herramienta de ejercicios más detallada (en ciertos sentidos)

Aparte de esto, la mayoría de lo que se puede tener en Moodle se obtiene únicamente a través de módulos/extensiones que la mayoría del tiempo (70%?) no están mantenidos de una versión de Moodle a la siguiente, y por lo tanto implican arreglos (si es que se pueden arreglar).

Saludos cordiales,

Yannick

Obviamente, esta lista cambiará a futuro. También llegará un momento en el cual Chamilo 2.0 aparecerá, accelerando el proceso de desarrollo.

Update 2012-05

A este artículo del año pasado se van sumando una serie de puntos que quizás puedan ser de algun uso para el lector.

Ante todo me gustaría regresar sobre el punto importante de la sencillez: disminuir por 5 el tiempo de capacitación de docentes tiene los siguientes impactos:

• reducción del costo de capacitación inicial
• reducción del impacto en la gestión del cambio (“sí, cambia, pero por algo que no es tan complicado“)
• reducción de la necesidad de soporte, pues los usuarios tienen la vida más fácil y por lo tanto molestan menos al equipo de soporte
• aumento de la motivación del staff docente, y en consecuencia mejora de la calidad de los cursos

Recientemente, en un correo en la lista del Linux Users Group de Perú, una persona con experiencia en Moodle 2 sugirió que este usa alrededor de 40MB de RAM por usuario conectado (por carga de página). Esto representa el uso total de memoria necesario para generar una sola página. Midiendo Chamilo 1.9 (todavía en desarrollo y sin optimización), llegamos a 22MB con el nuevo sistema de plantillas (Twig, de Symfony 2), lo que significa un uso de memoria dos veces menor.

De otro lado, Chamilo LMS usa poco de este paradigma de desarrollo llamado el orientado objeto, y que si bien en teoría mejora mucho la reusabilidad de componentes de software, en muchos casos está usado y abusado por los desarrolladores para poner orientado objeto de todos lados, aun cuando esto no tiene sentido. Pues no es nuestro caso, por lo que es muy probable que Chamilo también use considerablemente menos recursos de procesador.

Me llamaron la atención también una serie de reportes que traduzco aquí del reciente iMoot, en el cual el público se pone en admiración frente a una serie de funcionalidades anunciadas para Moodle 2.3… que existen en Chamilo desde hace más de un año (a veces dos) y nos parecen totalmente naturales:

• “2.3 usa […]. Ajax ahora está activado por defecto […]“
• “La ayuda […] ha sido re-introducida para las actividades y los recursos[…]“
• “Las bocas se abren mientras […] sube ficheros en un curso […] con un simple drag and drop desde su escritorio” -> bueno, yo lo muestro en demo a cada rato y las bocas no se abren. No se si es que los hispano-hablantes somos menos impresionados con la tecnología o solo un poco menos enloquecidos por Moodle, pero por ahí tiene que haber una diferencia fundamental…
• “[…] jala un archivo zip […] dentro de un curso. Se extrae mágicamente y crea una jerarquía de carpetas. Más bocas abiertas[…]” -> aquí para nosotros no se jala directo para los zips. Si se quiere extraer con estructura, se tiene que usar el modo de subida simple, porque sino como hacemos para subir un archivo ZIP sin querer descomprimirlo?
• “Subidas de imágenes […] ahora generan sus propios thumbnails[…]“
• “Cuando se añade un fichero […] se genera un tipo de fichero y un tamaño para los estudiantes[…]“
• “Ya no hay 5 tipos de tareas[…]” -> que mala idea fue tener 5 tipos de herramientas de tareas para empezar, no?
• “[…] las fechas de entrega ahora aparecen en el calendario[…]“

Y así sigue por 1 hora, que fue la duración de la presentación de la próxima versión. Obviamente de vez en cuando hay algo menor que realmente es distinto de Chamilo LMS en sus versiones anteriores pero… todas estas funcionalidades que recién aparecerán en una versión 2.3 que saldrá el 18 de Junio del 2012, *ya las tenemos hace mínimo 9 meses* y en muchos casos más de 2 años, así que es bueno mantenerse informado y no juzgar demasiado rápido.

Hoy he tenido una reunión con una institución bastante grande, que me plantea la probabilidad alta de tener 100,000 alumnos dentro de 5 años (ahora tienen 27,000). Pues conversamos un rato sobre este asunto, y ellos estuvieron bastante preocupados por la idea de alojar un solo campus con esta cantidad.

La verdad es que nosotros alojamos dos campus de referencia: uno  de 142000 usuarios registrados pero solo hasta 600 simultáneos en un solo servidor (el campus gratuito de Chamilo) y otro de 11,000 alumnos registrados pero con hasta 3300 alumnos simultáneos. Este usa una infraestructura bastante más potente (que no está usada ni a un 10% por ahora), pero en fin de cuentas, lo que importa es que no hemos tenido que modificar casi nada de Chamilo (le agregué un poco de caché para la cantidad de usuarios conectados en simultáneo) y el servicio de alojamiento se resume literalmente a una intervención al año a menos que hayan actualizaciones importantes de seguridad.

En fin: lo que cuenta para tener una solución muy resistente de Chamilo no es solo la aplicación misma sino la gente que se va a encargar de ella. Con el mismo Chamilo LMS, se puede tener un éxito tremendo como se puede tener un fracaso total, dependiendo de las personas que se involucran en este y cómo se involucran en este.

The Power of e-Learning

It’s been my privilege and pleasure to work in the e-learning field for the last 7 year. Somehow, having a teacher as a mother and a computer scientist as a father, it was kind of a natural outcome that I’d be an e-learning specialist. Getting to know both first-world and third-world educational mechanism (I’m Belgian, lived in Belgium, Germany, the UK and Spain and have now been living mostly in Perú for the last 4 years) was a tremendous experience, and allowed me to view the educational problem as a whole (not without a few great talks from TED confirming my views were not singular illusions). I also got the opportunity to meet with a series of people involved in the One Laptop Per Child project. This whole experience made me realize how much e-Learning (being understood as the provision of automated and interactive course content, be it remotely or locally) can really help education. As such, I’d like to share with you a few commonly found misjudgments about e-learning and why I think they are wrong.

Misjudgments about e-Learning

Fear of machines

The thing is, people fear computers. At best, they think they will never be able to use them the way they should, at worst, they think computers will finally make their work obsolete, triggering their unemployment and a life of poverty. The truth is, in 7 years of implementing e-learning platforms, I have never seen a company or institution obsoleting an employee because of anything related to e-Learning. In fact, the organizations implementing e-Learning end up growing faster, generating access to a wider audience, and finally an increase of staff required to handle this additional audience. e-Learning is not to be feared, it should be embraced and integrated, at a reasonable pace. As a science fiction put it, “If any teacher can be replaced by a computer, they probably should”. The problem is not whether you’ll be replaced or not, it is whether you like your job or not, and make learning a great experience for your students.

Obsoleting human role of teachers

Most of the time, teachers fear this will destroy the human character of in-class teaching, when in fact it is the exact opposite. As the implementations grow in reach, courses are taught differently. The teacher moves from a teaching role to a support role: a role that will allow him to reach better his full potential and that will improve the quality of learning of his students, ending up in higher achievements in the classroom. This, in fact, gives the teacher a more human role, as Salman Khan explains in a TED video about his Khan Academy project.

Quality of education

Yet another fear is that the education provided through e-Learning will be mediocre, at best, because computers cannot reach the inner sense of the learners and answer all their questions. This fear disappears after a one-day training about e-Learning. Once you start using a well-structured system to order and create courses, you realize this couldn’t be more wrong: structuring your courses inside an e-Learning platform make them easier to improve iteratively, easier to share with other teachers to improve as a teaching community, and easier to distribute to students and gather feedback (nominative or anonymous), resulting in faster improvements all over.

Another aspect of an e-Learning system is that most boring and pedagogically useless tasks, if you are a teacher, can be automated: you will be capable of developing auto-evaluation tests that your students can repeat to practice their understanding of the course. Correction of those tests will be automatic, resulting in a 50% to 75% decrease on your correction work (you will still need to review the lowest results and comment on them). This decrease allows you to focus on writing better tests and reviewing the redaction of your courses, so that students will learn better and faster. You will not work less, you will work better, get higher success rates with your students, which will finally improve your reputation and generate corresponding advantages.

This improved bettering capability is often overlooked, as the first reaction is only fear. However, once the fear barrier has been passed, some guidance will help you to understand how to make it easy to improve your content (guidance to be sought from e-Learning training/consulting providers).

Not cost effective

Of course, it all depends on how you are willing to use your system. Some organizations use e-Learning as a complement to their normal teaching, to enable access by a wider public, so the return on investment for them is really easy to measure. Others reduce costs of classical teaching by limiting printed materials and increasing rooms availability. We’ve recently been reported US$14,000 savings by not printing cooking lessons’ material for 800 students, in only 4 months time! The most difficult to calculate ROI comes from organizations implementing e-Learning to offer a better infrastructure to their students and avoid students leakage by getting leveled with their competitors. This is generally due to getting late in face of the competition, and the objective their is not a quick ROI calculation, but rather not getting obsoleted as a whole organization.

e-Learning platforms crash all the time

Apparently, many e-Learning consumers report e-Learning platforms are unreliable and tend to be unavailable when they need them. To be fair, that might happen with any platform. This is why you need the right service provider to help you. Many platforms are available for free (yes, that’s $0), but the system must always be provided by a reliable service provider. In our experience, and for a 7500 students university (now 11,000), our system has been down for a total of 12 hours (unplanned downtime) in 3 years time (36 months). That’s about 20 minutes per *month* of unavailability, and it was mostly due to changing the whole infrastructure to handle more users.

e-Learning systems are used to “spy” over the teachers

While it is true that systems like that generally make a lot of tools available to track the users (teachers *and* students), the initial objective is only to make it easier for everybody to help and be helped by others. If you fear somebody will use that to spy on you, this probably means you would fear any kind of peer review and, as such, you are concerned yourself about doing a good job. An e-Learning platform will give you tools and guidelines to stop worrying and get out of this unnecessary fear.

Useless for developing countries (where it’s most needed)

Another, more moral, misjudgment, is that e-Learning cannot reach developing countries because it would require infrastructure that is not yet available to these countries (i.e.: reliable power supply and Internet connexions). Well our recent experience in Peru and Uruguay, as well as a series of TED videos about the OLPC project tend to prove the contrary: even the more rudimentary access to learning content and technology will allow students to learn faster and better. This is the whole concept of OLPC in Peru, for example. Following the now 2-years old results of a public exam of the teachers population in Peru, only 4% of new teachers had the required level of reading and mathematics in a population of 18000 new teachers candidates. This is believed to be a representative figure (10%) of the total number of teachers in Peru (about 280,000). If the teachers do not have the level required to teach the kids, what is the solution? Only re-teach the teachers and hope this time it will work better? How much time will that take? Another solution is to provide the students with sufficient learning content and at least provide them with the possibility to learn by themselves. In Peru, the One Laptop Per Child project smartly provides 20,000 texts in Spanish from Wikipedia on every XO laptop. Another TED video, by Sugata Mitra, explains how kids teach themselves when provided with the opportunity to learn (and Educational Technology). There is also a nice video about the results of the OLPC project in Uruguay by the government responsible Miguel Brechner Frey (as well as a series of videos of teachers in Uruguay using our platform).

Complexity of systems

Finally, people in first contact with e-Learning systems (which generally involves passing through the previous barriers, but sometimes is taken as a “true fact” through peers comments, without even putting the effort of trying it by oneself. In any case, Chamilo (the platform we develop) is widely recognized in our user base as being much easier to use than any other e-Learning platform, simply because it is more intuitive and does not require much training to get started. Some have commented that moving from [other platform] to Chamilo was like evolving from water to air, reducing training time for teachers from 40 to just 7h!

It is difficult to explain just how important ease of use is, to the whole e-Learning implementation business. Not only does it drastically reduce cost of implementation, it also accelerates implementations, boosts content creation (teachers feel they can create almost anything easily) and increases students participation (whatever their age).

Conclusion

It has become increasingly clearer to me over the years that, by implementing e-Learning and empowering teachers and learners, the quality, availability, “engageability” and completeness of content will increase drastically. The first implementation is the most complicated of all, because it requires an open mind, but the paradigm shift, from “teaching teacher” to “supporting and inspiring teacher”, can be a very smooth progression to which any teacher can participate and contribute at his pace. Furthermore, the progressive increase in availability of shareable content (see the Khan Academy) will make it easier for teachers around the world to re-use high quality content and to contribute to building missing content for a complete “learnable” resources database.

There are many ways to start implementing an e-Learning system, and all of them can be successful if you have the right partner. Let us know if you need help at info@beeznest.com.

Chamilo admin page slow – disable version check

In some very strict cases of network filtering, you might realize that your Chamilo server is slow when using the administration pages, but is actually very fast for the rest and doesn’t use your server excessively in any measure.

The use of the “top” command in a GNU/Linux terminal and the corresponding non-excessive load should give you a hint that this is more of a network problem anyway.

If you have checked the “version check” box in your main admin page, every time you load the page, a query is sent to http://version.chamilo.org/version.php. If, for some reason, your server cannot access this page, it’s better for you to disable the query: go to your main/admin/index.php script and look for a call to check_system_version2(); and just put // in front the line to comment it out.

Les classes dans Chamilo

Courrier d’un utilisateur de Chamilo:

Bonjour,

Nous souhaitons utiliser Chamillo comme ENT dans notre établissement.

Chamillo correspond aux attentes de nos professeurs et de la direction.
Je suis habitué à l’administration de DOKEOS et je ne retrouve pas dans Chamillo la possibilité d’activer les classes pour ensuite pouvoir inscrire des classes aux espaces de cours. Pouvez vous me renseigner a ce sujet?
Merci d’avance pour votre réponse.

Réponse:

Tu trouveras l’option dans Administration -> Paramètres de configuration
de Chamilo -> Utiliser les sessions -> Non.

Ceci devrait te donner les classes à nouveau.

Note que la fonctionnalité de classes n’est plus supportée depuis
quelques versions déjà (en faveur des sessions), mais que la 1.8.8
contiendra un système de “groupes” d’utilisateurs qui se rapproche fort
des classes.

Cordialement,

Yannick Warnier