Illias or something like it in Germay

Illias or something like it in Germay

by Timothy Takemoto -
Number of replies: 18
At a meeting of our new academic department today, when I broached the subject of encouraging staff to use Moodle to back up their offline edcation, one of the leading members of our team expressed the opinion that
1) Moodle is extremely difficult to use surprise
2) A software suite by the name of "Illias" or similar ( I can't seem to find it on the web) should, if anything, be recommended instead. 
I have been given permission to introduce Moodle to the staff. Before that time I would like to look into "Illias." Does anyone know what it is, and whether it is in fact easy, even easier to use?
I would be especially keen to hear impartial comment from those that have used "Illias" and Moodle.
Timothy 
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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: Illias or something like it in Germay

by Zbigniew Fiedorowicz -
Look on the Moodle Buzz page for the following item:

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In reply to Zbigniew Fiedorowicz

Re: Illias or something like it in Germay

by Timothy Takemoto -

Thank you very much!

Has any one else had any experience using *Ilias*

Now that I know how to spell it...
Ilias Demo (can't seem to get it to do much)
http://www.ilias.uni-koeln.de/demo/start.php
A comparison of Moodle and Ilias on our own German forums.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=11466
Comparison of Moodle, ATutor, Ilias, Edu Plone in Italian
http://www.web-learning.org/LineaPortale/comune/wl2/wl2_14_toffoli
The homepage of a professor who moved from Ilias to Moodle, but not necessarily for ever
http://danielson.laurentian.ca/drdnotes/default.htm
A question to the Ilias forums asking the same thing as here (with no response, and the forum is locked so that noone can!)
http://tinyurl.com/9sanq
A comparison in German between Moodle, Ilias and Stud.ip
http://www.ihk-e-learning.de/relaunch/kurskatalog/lms-vc/basiss.php
Comparison between many OS systems where Moodle in top 5 but ATutor first and Ilias 2nd place (2003)
http://www.col.org/Consultancies/03LMSOpenSource.pdf
Study of many systems where Ilias comes out on top (German)
http://virtual-learning.qualifizierung.com/publikationen/Evaluation-LMS-Schulen.pdf
General Comparison Page
http://tinyurl.com/bjhsl
Learning Management Systems for the Rest of US: Moodle wins, Ilias runner up
http://odtl.dcu.ie/projects/web-tl/vle/CUE-LMS-White-Paper.pdf


Timothy

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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: Illias or something like it in Germay

by Ralf Hilgenstock -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Translators
Hi Timothy,

Ilias is a developement of the university of cologne, 30 km from my hometown Bonn.

Ilias has a different concept. In the middle is the desk of a student. He can choose different activities in an abonnement. http://www.ilias.de/ios/index-e.html

Ilias has a good concept for roles. The admin can define roles. Ilias can export and import scorm on Level LMS-RTE3.

moodle has much more learning activities and the better pedagogical concept. The pedagogical concept of ilias is information input, discussion,test. There is no idea of a learning group.

The ilias administration is not so easy as the moodle administration.  If you have a look to the ilias community, you can see that there are only a few discussions.

ralf


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In reply to Ralf Hilgenstock

Re: Illias or something like it in Germay

by Timothy Takemoto -

Thank you Ralph,

I found the subscription (abonnement) idea rather compex. Are those activities courses or would students have to subscribe to a lot of different activities per course?

The pedagogical concept may not be all that much of a problem bearing in mind my preferences, or failings, as an educator. I guess the input, discussion, test pedagogy makes for easier SCORM integration.

The forums are at least an order of magnitude less active and the most popular forum that for bug reportsthoughtful with about 1600 posts. And it is strange that they are using phpbb or similar rather than the Ilias forums. And when I go to post (asking about Japanese language)　I get "phpBB : Critical Error."

I wonder how many posts there are here now? I just searched for "is" and got 57000 odd hits.

Timothy

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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: Illias or something like it in Germay

by Ralf Hilgenstock -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Translators
Yes, students  klick all the activities they will use and have then a link on their personal desktop.
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In reply to Ralf Hilgenstock

Re: Illias or something like it in Germay

by Timothy Takemoto -
Thanks very much.
That does not sound very easy to do at all. Sensei, "I could not find it!"
Timothy
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Comparison

by Michael Penney -
http://www.edutools.info/course/compare/compare.jsp?product=234,203

Edutool's feature comparisons are often problematic, but in this case you might miss things like quizzes and gradebook (esp the new gradebook in 1.5 and the new quiz features), according to edutools, Ilias has neither.

Also, it only looks like it's in 10 languages (and not Japanese, don't you teach Japanese?).

We evaluated it along with aTutor and Moodle, a few years ago, but haven't used it since.

They have a demo here:
http://www.ilias.uni-koeln.de/ios/demo-e.html

It may seem easier to use since it doesn't have that many features?:
http://www.ilias.uni-koeln.de/ios/docs/i3_featurelist_07-2004.pdf


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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Comparison

by Timothy Takemoto -

Michael

Thank you. I teach in Japanese (mainly English, some cultural psychology) but apparently the Japanese version is "coming soon."

Did you publish the results of your comparison, or your impressions?

Definately low on features - it only seems to have forums, resources, and tests.  I can't understand how it works. I can see how someone who is used to it would find Moodle different, to say the least.

But SCORM is a powerful buzzword around here, and since I am rather into (employed to do) online testing the features *might* not be that much of a problem. 

Has anyone used the Ilias tests? Is there full (three-way, answer, question and question from bank) randomisation? Copy 'proofing'? Sub-Categories? GIFT like text based quiz creation? Timing? Date setting? Marking styles (highest, lowest, average)? I see that they have one question per page.

Timothy

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In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Comparison

by Timothy Takemoto -

So some rough and ready simple comparisons...

                                      Moodle     Ilias
Standard Modules*                14           5
Languages**                         52          10
Posts to forums***             ~70000    ~7000
Clicks to add a resource      ~2           ~5


* In Ilias' case perhaps: Student Hyperlinks, Forums, Resources, Tests, Activities
**Not including, in Moodle's case varieties of French or English or different encodings of the same language.
***And that is only a rough guess for Using Moodle alone! There seems to be only one English/German forum for Ilias. I wonder how many posts there are on all of the Moodle forums.

Any idea of comparison of lines of code? Number of sites? Number of large offline Universities (Perhaps I should start that major university thread again)?

Timothy

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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: Comparison

by Zbigniew Fiedorowicz -
Number of large offline Universities (Perhaps I should start that major university thread again)?

Well if you go to the page: http://www.ilias.de/ios/info.html and look under the section entitled Referenzinstallationen, you will see a selection of Ilias sites.

As for the number of posts on moodle.org, note that post id numbers are numbered consecutively in the Moodle database, and you can see the post id number by clicking on the reply link of the post.  For instance your post, to which I am replying now, has id number 105175.  This means that there were that many posts in the moodle.org server database at the time of your posting.  [A few of them may have been deleted.]

A similar idea applies to the total number of users who have ever registered on moodle.org.  By looking at the new users listed in this course, we find one with id number 56892.  This means that at least this many users have been registered here.
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In reply to Zbigniew Fiedorowicz

Re: Comparison

by Timothy Takemoto -

Well answered Zbigniew, Thank you.

Then the scores on the doors are then, provisionally:

                                     Moodle     Ilias    Factor
Standard Modules*                14           5      ~3
Clicks to add a resource      ~2           ~5      2.5
Languages**                         52          10     ~5
Posts to forums***             105175    7289    ~14
Users on forums                 56892    1262     ~45
sites+                                 3216       104    ~30
Googlefight++ 1                633,000   578,000  ~1
Googlefight 2 &education   37,000    38,900  ~3.5
Googlefight 3 &CMS           87,100    4,150    ~21
Freshmeat popularity M I      512        4052     ~8
Freshmeat vitality+++ M I      130       2662     ~20

*,**,** as above
+ Perhaps Ilias only lists "institutions" rather than persons with a Moodle site. Hence perhaps I should look into the number or brick and mortar schools/colleges and perhaps businesses running Moodle (or extract the latter from both). Ilias' counted by hand.
++ Both Moodle and Ilias refer to things other than the CMS of that name.
+++Ilias has too few ratings to allow comparison (Ilias has only one ranking to Moodle's 53).


How about lines of code? Is anyone conversant with CVS able to share a figure?

I think I will start with the assertion that Moodle is the Linux of LCMS.

Timothy

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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: Comparison

by Zbigniew Fiedorowicz -
I got the following figures using "wc":
  Moodle 1.4.4+: 363,391 lines of php (exluding languages other than en)
  Ilias 3.3.2: 416,788 lines of php


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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: Illias or something like it in Germay

by Enrique Castro -
Picture of Core developers

Hi Tim,
I have not used Ilias in a real environment (thanks Lord!!)
I did try it as in the "demo" sites you have found when I was looking for an e-learning tool and found ... Moodle.

I liked better the "personal desktop" approach of Ilias rather than Atutor (pre 1.4 Atutor was almost a Web book and little else). But I saw the working with Ilias as extremely "heavy". Adding anything is a pain.
For example: if you want to add a "resource", you need to go first to the administrative interface. There you define the title of the resource, the scope, and its type. You cannot add content, first you "create" a page. Once you have the page (abstract, you never see the page content like a text area), you add a "title", and then a "paragraph" or a "link", by choosing the suitable option from a dropdown menu. But you never see the page just a tree more or less like this.

Page1
--title
--Para 1
     content of para 1
--para 2
----- section 1
----- link 1
----- section 2

If you want a word in bold, first add a new "fragment", set a "style" for that fragment and then you can specify the style is bold. This is wonderful for meta-tagging and to make a consistent Content Management System with standardized "look&feel" across courses, but it is at antipodes of "user-friendly" in my book. Ilias has ILEX, an offline system to accept contents created in OpenOffice and import them into Ilias server. I understand that few people would like to work directly with Ilias content editor.

Please, notice all above "content" is the focus (as in Atutor).  Ilias 3 do have an "activity" concept ("exercise" is the name) but it is only a simple quiz (not even an autograded quiz). And there was no assignment concept (perhaps in newer versions).

Combine this and the very complicated and  un-understandable code and you know why my University (as many in Spain now) adopted  Moodle.

- Enrique -

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In reply to Enrique Castro

Re: Illias or something like it in Germay

by Timothy Takemoto -
Thank you very much Enrique. I wonder why my colleague recommended it. I am beginning to think that it was my fault.
Timothy
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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: Illias or something like it in Germay

by Enrique Castro -
Picture of Core developers
Hi Tim
Last summer a regional consortium of Spanish universities decided (I think without a solid market research) to adopt Ilias as their e-learning tool. They presented a kind of "whitepaper" with their decision, the technical merits of Ilias and the things that needed customization and improvement. Actually, their were asking public funds to support the development of such "improvements" in a shared effort by the 9 universities. They were asking a Director appointment, staff support and money, much money (euros in millions)

I went through the list of "improvements" that Ilias needed to become just "usable" by those universities, as detailed in the whitepaper: all unsatisfied requirements were standard features of Moodle 1.4.
By November we had our first MoodleMoot Spain, hosted by Jordi Adell at CENT-UJI. There the UJI and ULPGC presented our first experiences with Moodle. ULPGC is the first spanish University that decided to go all-way with Moodle using it for all courses: pregrad and grad, in any subject. Now several of those 9 universities are planning to introduce Moodle next year or running pilot test right now (and several others that were just waiting to see if we crashed or not).

However, Ilias is widespread in German universities. I think that it is solid system, and the roles implementation is better than Moodle, as is the CMS face, that interacts quite well (once you get the philosophy) with SCORM and the like. You can use it like in other CMS where you can set permissions to some people to create/edit content, but that content need be "approved" buy other role-person, and perhaps actual publication is done with other set of permissions/roles. These are probably good points in favor of Ilias over Moodle if managing "content" for a whole University is your main consideration. That kind of bureocratic management is definitely easier with Ilias.

- Enrique -
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In reply to Timothy Takemoto

Re: Illias or something like it in Germay

by Vu Hung -

Hi Tim,

I want to mention the installation of ILIAS. ILIAS is designed mainly for Linux. Installing ILIAS on Windows is very difficult (I tested). With Moodle, it takes a little time. It's my own exprerience.    

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