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| Product Name | ILIAS | Moodle 1.5.2 |
|---|---|---|
| Developer Name | ILIAS | Moodle.com |
| URL | ILIAS | Moodle 1.1 |
| Review Date | December 02, 2003 | August 26, 2005 |
| Forums | ILIAS Discussions | Moodle 1.5.2 Discussions |
| Reviewer | Email Review Staff | Email Review Staff |
| Communication Tools | ||
| Discussion Forums |
The software includes support for discussion forums. Discussions can be viewed by thread. Instructors can associate a discussion with any course content. Instructors may create separate discussion environments for small groups. Instructors can allow students to create groups. Groups can be open to all or only a select set of students. Discuss |
The discussion tool supports a social constructionist pedagogy model. Discussions can be viewed by date, by thread, by author. Instructors can split discussion branches from the main discussion into a new discussion. Instructors can determine the level of involvement (read, write, or post anonymously) for students. Posts can include attachments, an image or URL. The discussion tool includes a formatting text editor. Posts may be peer reviewed by other students. Students may receive posts to the dicussion forums as daily digests of subject lines or whole posts as email. Students can subscribe to forum RSS feeds. Discuss |
| File Exchange |
Students can submit assignments using drop boxes. Discuss | |
| Internal Email |
Students can use the Internal email feature to email individuals and groups. Discuss |
Students must have an external Internet email address. Discuss |
| Online Journal/Notes |
Students can attach notes to any page. Students can compile their notes with the course content to create a printable study guide. Discuss | |
| Real-time Chat |
The chat tool supports images. The system creates archive logs for all chat rooms. Instructors can view chat logs and share these with students. Instructors can schedule chats using the course calendar. Students can see who else is online within their course and send them an instant message. Discuss | |
| Video Services | ||
| Whiteboard | ||
| Productivity Tools | ||
| Bookmarks |
Students can create and categorize bookmarks in a private folder. Discuss | |
| Orientation/Help |
Students can access a student manual. Discuss |
Students can access context sensitive help. Discuss |
| Searching Within Course |
Students can simultaneously search course notes and documents from all of their courses. Discuss |
Students can search all discussion threads in their course and all glossary entries. Discuss |
| Calendar/Progress Review |
Students can view their completed and pending course readings and activities. All students have a personal home page that lists new email, all courses and groups in which the student is enrolled. Discuss |
Students can view their completed and pending course readings and activities. Students can view their grades on completed assignments. RSS feeds are available for a number of resources that can notify people using aggregators of changes to materials. Discuss |
| Work Offline/Synchronize |
Students can download course content into a format that can be printed or stored locally. Discuss | |
| Student Involvement Tools | ||
| Groupwork |
Instructors or students can assign students to groups. Each group can have its own discussion forum, chat room and file exchange. Discuss |
Instructors can assign students to groups or the system can randomly create groups. Groups can either be defined at the course level and apply across all activities that support them, or at the individual activity level. In addition, the system supports a workshop module aimed specifically at peer review of student work. Discuss |
| Self-assessment |
Instructors can create self-assessments. The system automatically scores multiple choice type questions. Discuss |
Instructors can create timed or un-timed self-assessments that students can take multiple times. The system automatically scores multiple choice, true/false, and short answer type questions and can display instructor-created feedback, explanations and links to relevant course material. Discuss |
| Student Community Building |
Students can send email to their groups, use a shared chat space and notice board, and share material privately within the group. Discuss | |
| Student Portfolios |
Students can create a personal home page. Students’ personal home pages may include a list of all discussion posts they have submitted, their photo, and personal information. Discuss | |
| Administration Tools | ||
| Authentication |
Administrators can set courses to be publicly accessible or can protect access to individual courses with a username and password. Students can maintain their own passwords. The system can also authenticate against an external LDAP server or using the RADIUS protocol. Discuss |
The system uses basic username and password authentication. The system can authenticate against a variety of sources, including external databases, LDAP directory servers, IMAP, POP3, secure NNTP and First Class servers, and Unix users through PAM. The system also supports Shibboleth and the Central Authentication Service (CAS). Discuss |
| Course Authorization |
Instructors can assign different levels of access to their course based on the following pre-defined roles: instructors, students, designers and guests. Discuss |
The software provides tools for Administrators to assign access privileges to different group roles: Administrators, Instructors, Students and Guests. Group role privileges can be further defined into subgroup privileges. Instructors or students may be assigned different roles in different courses. The system can access authorization information stored in other external directory services, including payment gateways. Discuss |
| Registration Integration |
Instructors can batch add students to a course using a delimited text file or students can self-register. The software supports integration with external information systems through an event-driven API or through a tool that is based on scheduled system exports. Discuss | |
| Hosted Services |
The product provider and partner companies offer hosted systems that include: managed software installation, service level agreements on a network of fault-tolerant Unix servers in a secure facility with environmental control, redundant Tier 1 network connections and power, 10Gb bandwidth per month and nightly backups. Hosting contracts are fixed per month and allow unlimited courses. Discuss | |
| Course Delivery Tools | ||
| Course Management |
Instructors can link discussions to specific dates or course events. The system can synchronize course dates defined by the institutional calendar. Discuss | |
| Instructor Helpdesk |
Instructors can access an online help manual and instructor support communities hosted through the development community website. Discuss |
Instructors can access the online instructor manual, context sensitive help, and an instructor support community hosted on the product provider’s site. Discuss |
| Online Grading Tools |
Instructors can mark assignments and all assessments not automatically scored online. Instructors can assign partial credit for certain answers. Instructors can add the grades for offline assignments to the online gradebook. Instructors can view grades in the gradebook by assignment, by student, and for all students on all assignments. Instructors can export a comma-delimited version of the gradebook (or a real .xls spreadsheet) for use in an external spreadsheet program. Instructors can provide feedback on all assignments through links to the relevant course content, and through annotations. Instructors can search the gradebook to find all students who meet a specific performance criteria, mark, or status such as exam completion. Instructors can create a course grading scale that can employ either percentages, letter grades or pass/fail metrics. When an instructor adds an assignment to the course, the software automatically adds it to the gradebook. Instructors can delegate the responsibility for grading assignments. Discuss | |
| Student Tracking |
Instructors can get reports showing the number of times, time, date, frequency and IP address of each student who accessed course content, discussion forums, course assessments, and assignments. Instructors can get a report that shows number of attempts and time per attempt on each assessment for individual students. Instructors can maintain private notes about each student in a secure area. Instructors can get a report that summarizes individual student performance on assignments. Instructors can set a flag on individual course components to track the frequency with which students access those components. Instructors can monitor students who are currently logged in to the course. Instructors can summarize all discussion posts to date by a student. Discuss | |
| Automated Testing and Scoring |
Instructors can create survey questions. Discuss |
Instructors can create automatically scored true/false, multiple choice, multiple answer, cloze, matching, numerical, calculated and short answer questions. Questions can contain images , video, other media files, and detailed feedback on each answer. Instructors can create mathematical equations. Custom question types can also be defined. Instructors can create personal, course specific or system wide test banks from questions can be chosen to create tests for students. Instructors can import questions from existing test banks. The system can randomize the questions in a test and the alternatives for multiple choice questions. Instructors can require a special password and set times for when students can or must access tests. Instructors can set a time limit on a test. Instructors can limit attempts to specific IP addresses. Instructors can differentially weight tests and create grading rules. Instructors can permit multiple attempts, and whether correct results are shown. Instructors can override the automated scoring. Instructors can also create survey questions. The system provides test analysis data for individual test items. The system also supports the Remote Quiz Protocol which allows questions to be rendered and scored externally to the system via standards-based web services. Discuss |
| Curriculum Design | ||
| Accessibility Compliance |
To comply with Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act, the software implements the following features: alt tags on all system images, and data tables that are optimized for use with screen readers. The system can also filter all user supplied inputs through W3C Tidy program to convert it to valid XHTML code. Discuss | |
| Course Templates |
The software provides support for template-based content creation. Instructors can use templates to create announcements, calendar entries, course content, course units, glossaries, syllabus and course descriptions. Course content may be uploaded through a form or chosen from a course-specific content library. Discuss |
The software provides three default course templates: activities arranged by week, activities arranged by topic, or a discussion-focussed social format. Instructors can create new course or content templates. Instructors can use templates to create discussion forums, links, course content, and resources, and these templates include a WYSIWYG content editor with spell-checking. Discuss |
| Curriculum Management | ||
| Customized Look and Feel |
Institutions can apply their own institutional images, headers and footers across all courses. Discuss |
The system provides 10 default course look and feel templates. Institutions can create their own look and feel templates across the entire system. Institutions can apply their own institutional images, headers and footers across all courses. Instructors can change the the navigation icons, color schemes, and order and name of menu items for a course. Discuss |
| Instructional Standards Compliance |
The software can import course content that is SCORM 1.2 or AICC compliant, and can export quiz content in IMS QTI 2.0 format. The system includes tools to facilitate the migration of course content between different versions of the software. The provider company supports migration from the following course management systems: BlackBoard. Discuss | |
| Instructional Design Tools |
Instructors can create both linear and nonlinear learning sequences organized hierarchically by course, lesson, topic, and chunk. Instructors can organize learning objects, content libraries into learning sequences. Discuss |
Instructors can create both linear and nonlinear learning sequences using a content library. Instructors can organize larning objects into learning sequences. The software supports constructivist and problem-based learning approaches. Instructors can create relationships between assignments and required resources which can then serve as templates for future lessons. Discuss |
| Content Sharing/Reuse | ||
| Hardware/Software | ||
| Client Browser Required |
The software supports any browser supporting HTML 3 or higher and uses cascading style sheets (CSS) in browsers that support CSS. Discuss | |
| Database Requirements |
The system requires MySQL 4.0.14 or higher. Discuss |
The system supports either MySQL or PostgreSQL databases. The system requires only one database and can coexist with tables from other applications. Discuss |
| Server Software |
The software implements the following open source utilities: Apache 1.3.28; MySQL 4.0.14; PHP 4.3.2; Zlib 1.1.4; IJG JPEG 6b; libpng 1.2.5; GD 1.8.4; ImageMagick 4.2.9; Info-ZIP Zip 2.3; Info-ZIP Unzip 5.50; and PEAR packages necessary for running ILIAS3 with PHP 4.3.1. Discuss |
The software requires PHP 4.1.0 or later, MySQL(or PostgreSQL), and a web server. The software was developed using the Apache web server. The software includes: administration reports through a web browser, course archive and restore, installation setup wizard that includes database creation, backup and archiving, tools to backup and purge either course content or student data for individual courses and groups, rotated logs, notification services, a display of the last sessions in the system that can be filtered by either IP address or date, site configuration. Typically, local administrators install the software. The product provider offers for-fee installation consultation. Discuss |
| UNIX Server |
The software was developed with RedHat Linux 7.x/8.0, but will also work with other Linux distributions, Solaris and other Unix systems. Suggested (minimum) hardware recommendations are: 1 Pentium III 800 Mhz procesor, 512 MB RAM and SCSI/RAID hard disks. Discuss |
The software is available for most variants of Linux or Unix. Discuss |
| Windows Server |
The software is available for a variety of Windows web servers. Discuss | |
| Pricing/Licensing | ||
| Company Profile |
The software was initially developed as part of the VIRTUS project in the Faculty of Economics, Business Administration and Social Sciences at the University of Cologne, and is now also worked on by the Sal. Oppenheim Foundation and the Department of Science and Research of the State of Northrhine-Westphalia. Discuss |
Moodle.org is an open source community launched in 2001 that has grown out of a PhD research project by Martin Dougiamas. Version 1.0 was released on August 20, 2002. Moodle.com is a company launched in 2003 that sponsors Moodle development and provides commercial support, hosting, custom development and consulting. The Moodle Partners are a network of companies that work with Moodle.com to provide services around the world. Discuss |
| Costs |
The software is free. Discuss |
The software is free and distributed under the GNU Public License. Discuss |
| Open Source |
The software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Discuss |
The software is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Discuss |
| Optional Extras |
The system provides support for secure online tuition payment by credit card. Discuss |
More than 45 language translations are available as plug-in packs. Each course can have its own glossary which can be maintained by the instructor or collaboratively by the students. Terms in the glossary that appear in the course can be auto-linked back to the glossary. The system has a module which accepts payments for course registrations via PayPal. The system supports the creation of Wikis. The system can display RSS feeds. Discuss |
| Software Version |
The software version number is 2.3.8 Discuss |
The current software version number is 1.5.2. Discuss |
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