ILIAS conference blog

Podcasts in Higher Education

My speech was formerly named „Veni, vidi, wiki – and other web 2.0 applications in teaching”, but then I decided to focus on podcasts instead.

I tried to show that at the PHTG (Pädagogische Hochschule Thurgau; University of Teacher Education) there are also students which are producing content, not only teachers.

From 3 presented projects, there are two with students as content producers. One project is just in development, but I was able to present a prototype from this project.

All projects are soundly evaluated and I presented the results of one project evaluation.

The examples are unfortunately not accessible for public – except of one: www.grenzgeschichten.ch

For questions and information don’t hesistate to contact me.

Sonja Burgauer

presentation Sonja Burgauer

Project and Development Status of ILIAS

At the last ILIAS conference in Hamburg I presented the current status of the project and the software development. To introduce my speech I mentioned some interesting figures about ILIAS, like 10 years of ILIAS, the software’s estimated value of 13.500.000 $ (source: ohloh.net), more then 25.000 downloads since the last conference and the 1st Open Source LMS that has been certified as SCORM2004 compliant.

The main part of my presentation was about our content, collaboration, assessment and integration strategies and their impact on the development process. I mentioned some of the new features for ILIAS 3.10 and 3.11, incl. Wiki, Calendar, Course Management extensions and the planned SCORM 2004 editor.

The slides are in German and published under a Creative Commons licence: 2008-09_iconf_kunkel.pdf

Matthias Kunkel

ILIAS Conference 2009 in Budapest

The 2009 ILIAS conference takes place at November 12 and 13, 2009 in Budapest, Hungaria. Host will be Dennis Gabor College, Hungary’s well-known private university for Applied Sciences. Dennis Gabor College is also co-ordinating the Hungarian ILIAS user group. More information about the programme and registration will be soon available on the ILIAS conference web site.

Matthias Kunkel

Online Exams - Mastering German Law Requirements in a Practical Way

Since 2005 ILIAS is known to be a useful system for online exams. In a pilot phase we proved that we can handle more then 400 participants in a practical way. But that is only the technical point of view. Before we can establish a service for the whole university some important points have to be discussed, because usually an exam is an official document which qualifies yourself for your future profession.

In my talk I will discuss some important issues which are based on the three laws which are tackled by exams. I will give a short overview how we combined the advantages of online exams with those of a traditional exam. Finally, I will present some key questions, you should answer, before you start with online exams.

Apart of my talk, there is workshop, where we will guide you through the domain of online exams.

Roland Küstermann

Slides of the presentation are available as pdf-files: onlineklausuren_kuestermann.pdf

The whole range from Wiki to SCORM

I would like to invite you to our workshop about content creation in ILIAS on Wednesday afternoon, September 10th. Join us discussing current practice and sketching a vision of future collaborative content creation.

Prof. Marcus Birkenkrahe from Berlin School of Economics will present us a recent example: the creation of ILIAS learning modules and wiki project management by students in an international course of studies. In this project the students had to discover and implement a didactic perspective on eLearning by their own. In the long run a part of this program of study should be virtualised when the students are abroad for work placement. ILIAS, together with other Web 2.0 tools will be the technical core of a strategy to enrich teaching and learning with virtual communities.

Along this example we can discuss the following questions:

• What are the didactic, technical and social prerequisites to create effective learning modules collaboratively?
• How is the concept of “virtual learning communities” meaningfully integrated in a presence course?
• How can the course members provide their own didactic contributions?
• What are the students’ experiences of creating their own learning modules?

This example gives us a good foundation to think ahead. In a project proposal I developed with the ILIAS team the concept of a staged production process with each step leading to didactically richer content:

• free collaborative collection of media-rich content pieces in a wiki style supported by social and semantic tagging,
• template based creation of SCORM 2004 compliant learning modules, reusing the wiki content,
• extension of the SCORM learning modules to tightly integrate collaborative activities and services in the content.

We think this process, realised in ILIAS has the potential to support a wide range of learning communities. For a proof-of-concept we already found three: a German senior organisation, a Greek higher education institute and Roman military training and security education. These scenarios, representing three different stages in life-long learning, will help us to discuss the raising questions:

• What are the different roles and tasks in collaborative content creation?
• How will the collaboration of experienced and inexperienced authors work?
• What is the appropriate grade of complexity for them in each authoring mode?
• What technical features can support the structuring of loose information collections to didactically meaningful content?

Alex Killing, head of ILIAS development will tell us about the recent and upcoming features of ILIAS supporting this process and I will show how it is able to overcome the didactic limitations of current eLearning standards.

Share with us your ideas and visions for content creation in and around ILIAS!

Looking forward to seeing you in Hamburg

Fred Neumann

Why ILIAS is a good choice for defense institutions

Tuesday afternoon, September 9th, I will hold a workshop on ILIAS in defense institutions:

ILIAS is especially popular in the security and defense sector. It is used by a variety of defense forces ranging from small countries to some of the worlds biggest. They have chosen ILIAS as their e-learning technology because it satisfies their specific requirements and needs.

My workshop will highlight four requirements that have been put forward as high priority for these defense institutions. During the workshop a lot of real world cases will be presented ranging from US Joint Forces Command, NATO School, Partnership for Peace Consortium, ENCOA and others.

Defense specific security requirements:

• Report on Allied Command Transformation project on security of ILIAS
• ILIAS has been checked by industry-leading security applications
• ILIAS is NATO security approved

 

Defense specific interoperability requirements:

• Getting the data into and out of the system easily is important
• SCORM 1.2 and 2004 certification
• International cooperation among NATO/PfP stakeholders

 

Defense specific structural requirements:

• Defense institutions are complex and dispersed organisations
• LMS has to be extremly flexible to support this organisational complexity
• Role-based access and simple support of multiple CIs

 

Defense specific didactical requirements:

• A wide range of didactical scenarios is supported from collaborative and constructive to instructor lead ones, from ADL to fully tutored ones
• Mature, widely used test & assessment tool for online exams, self assessment and alternative assessment
• Didactics-focused content production process

 

I would be happy to welcome you for this workshop in Hamburg!

best

Alexandra Toedt

Join the Community of Practice!

ILIAS users from Europe and overseas meet this year at Helmut Schmidt University in Hamburg (Germany) to exchange their experiences and plans in e-learning. Major topics will be good practice examples for

• e-assessment
• creating content
• organising e-learning at universities, in business, and in defense institutions
• integrating ILIAS in IT infrastructures

Keynote speaker of the conference is Geir Isaksen, chair of from NATO Working Group for Individual Training and Educational Development. He is presenting “E-Learning-based Training and Education for Peace Supporting Operations“. The program and further information about the conference is available at the conference’s website.

The 7th ILIAS conference takes place together with the annual Fernausbildungskongress of the Federal Armed Forces of Germany.