I just received the following message about Claroline--I guess because I tried to install it a year ago, before I found Moodle. Claroline is interesting for our community as an early open source CMS--a part of our heritage. We may learn from their experiments, and especially about the possibilities of a face-to-face developers conference.
Don
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Dear Friends,
As some of you may know, we have decided to go on developing Claroline under a new name : Dokeos. See http://www.dokeos.com .
This has many reasons, but one of the most important is that UCL (where I created Claroline 3 years ago) has now a Trade Mark on Claroline but doesn't really want to invest in its development. There will be a release of Dokeos 1.5. that can be considered as the continuation of Claroline 1.4.2. and will allow upgrade from it.
The beta of Dokeos 1.5 should appear on February 27.
There will be an important meeting both physical and online with all the developers and the potential developers of Dokeos, Tuesday 27 February, 10 am (Brussels hour = GMT+1) on :
http://www.dokeos.com/online/
The participation to the conference is free.
TOPIC
The topic of the conference is a technical discussion to organise the beta release of Dokeos 1.5. So there will be little talk on pedagogy. It is mainly a programmers conference.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
The audio is ONE TO MANY. You hear the people that are present in Brussels but you can not talk back. To interact, use the chat (it is a web chat so you don't need any plugin).
HOW TO CONNECT TO THE CONFERENCE?
1. Go to http://www.dokeos.com/online/ at 9h55am GMT+1
2. Type a pseudo (for instance your First name)
3. Click on Audio (you will need a mp3 streaming player like QuickTime 6.1 or later, recent Winamp or even RealPlayer One + a soundcard and speakers or headphone)
4. Listen to the conference, type your questions or proposals on the chat frame below. And that's it.
You can test your computer and sound devices on http://www.dokeos.com/online before. If you hear classical music, then you are ok. See also http://www.dokeos.com/conf.php for a clear description of the tool.
Yours,
Thomas De Praetere
Creator of Claroline
http://www.claroline.net
Director of Dokeos
http://www.dokeos.com
Yes, I saw that recently too.
I notice they're on to our strategy - 6-letter names!
I notice they're on to our strategy - 6-letter names!
Original name for TeLeTOP in 1997 was TeLeTO. That makes also 6.
( Then professor J.M. came and added the final P 
..Or should I say: "Magical number seven plus or minus two.. 
)
I recived this e-mail, intersting indeed.
Dear friends, (en français plus bas)
Somebody has registered the Trade Mark "Claroline" without asking me and wants to re-sell it at a very high price.
In accordance to Open Source philosophy, I have decided not to accept this and to change for a new name, DOKEOS : http://www.dokeos.com.
Please note than from now on our project of an Open Source e-Learning software will be called DOKEOS.
The development community of ex-Claroline already knows this and is developing the next version of the software under the name Dokeos1.5.
This version will, of course, allow upgrade from Claroline 1.4.2. and should appear in BETA version on Feb 27, 2004.
Yours,
Thomas De Praetere
Creator of Claroline software
Dear friends, (en français plus bas)
Somebody has registered the Trade Mark "Claroline" without asking me and wants to re-sell it at a very high price.
In accordance to Open Source philosophy, I have decided not to accept this and to change for a new name, DOKEOS : http://www.dokeos.com.
Please note than from now on our project of an Open Source e-Learning software will be called DOKEOS.
The development community of ex-Claroline already knows this and is developing the next version of the software under the name Dokeos1.5.
This version will, of course, allow upgrade from Claroline 1.4.2. and should appear in BETA version on Feb 27, 2004.
Yours,
Thomas De Praetere
Creator of Claroline software
Is there any comparison moodle/claroline?
Thanks Peter
Personally there is no comparison; Moodle wins hands down in every aspect. But your mileage may vary.
I am in the process of reviewing both Dokeos/Clarolne and Moodle. Can I ask why you feel so strongly that Moodle wins hands down?
I'm not sure if you noticed, but this thread is from last february (2004) so the participants may not all still be members of this forum.
Sorry if you knew this but I made this mistake myself just the other week after searching the forum for a topic I wanted to discuss and finding relevant postings from almost exactly a year previously.
Mainly the numbers and depth of the Moodle community.
'Dokeos' has a much smaller number of people working on it and with it, and seems to still be searching for a viable business model to fund it's continued development.
'Dokeos' has a much smaller number of people working on it and with it, and seems to still be searching for a viable business model to fund it's continued development.
I am not what the difference is between numbers and depth but I accept that Dokeos is a much smaller 'operation'. Claroline may be more viable in the long term, who knows?
I guess my main question is with functions. I still have a sort of feeling that Dokeos/Claroline is more orientated to content and Moodle is more orientated towards social dynamics. I accept that my expereince of Moodle is brief but It is litle things like not being able to create folders within folders and actually not yet having found a way to creat more than one folder to contain files in a course.
Perhaps it is simply that I have not found out how to do it, but if it is taking me this long, how will our other non-techie staff manage.
I guess my main question is with functions. I still have a sort of feeling that Dokeos/Claroline is more orientated to content and Moodle is more orientated towards social dynamics. I accept that my expereince of Moodle is brief but It is litle things like not being able to create folders within folders and actually not yet having found a way to creat more than one folder to contain files in a course.
Perhaps it is simply that I have not found out how to do it, but if it is taking me this long, how will our other non-techie staff manage.
Hi Steve, what happens when you go into a folder in the course files and click the Make Folder button?
If you can't make a folder inside a folder, there may be something wrong with your installation.
If you can't make a folder inside a folder, there may be something wrong with your installation.
You also have to think in a different way: in Claroline/Dekeos/BB/aTutor you organise from a technical point of view: "Here are your forums, here are you resources, here is your timetable, etc..."
In Moodle you organise from an educational point of view:
You can organise thematic sets of activity-cards. (max=52, we choose 10 per sub-course)
You take a card, (in Moodle language: section) put an educational theme on it and organise resources and activities around that theme. The students and teachers see things together in a section and think that these things belong together (they should )
Starting from a course from last your, you can reshuffle the sections and the tasks. With the new LAYOUT block (search in the forums) You even get a drag and drop tool for that! (Our teachers love it!!)
Hints and guidelines for teachers can be placed on the same spot as where the student resources/activities/hints are placed. By closing the eye behind resources you can hide them for the students if that is your wish. (very handy)
With (multiple) intend you can refine the visual organisation of the resources and the activities on the cards. (label has also the function to improve the visual organisation on the central panel-board of Moodle)
On this moment you can choose from 30+ preformatted student activities like:
- interactive glossaries (categories, clearinghouse, autohyperlinking)
- a powerfull educational wiki (with group or personal password)
- multimedia quizzes
- assignments with Scales (moving to Rubrics)
- a simple and clear workflow module with peeerreview (workshop)
- a matrix-activity module (lesson) also usable for flashcards
For teachers there are handy tools to create content on the fly (multipage resource, book) or paste resources from elswhere (hotpot-player I and II, Scormplayer 1.2, Flashplayer, mp3-player..)
Around each course you can organise support activities for students and teachers in the so called blocks. On this moment you have to surf the forums to find them, but there will be soon a block-archive:
- A complete integrated Calendar/timetable
- A box where students can store files and weblinks and share these with other students in each course
- a handy tool for group mail inside each course
- a handy tool for sending memo's to others in the course, including IN- and OUT-que-boxes (placed normally in section zero, the always visible topsection in the panel-view)
- handy tools for collecting weblinks, searching on the web, visiting Wikipedia, doing word translations, calculations, ..
- reminder tools for students and teachers: red spots in the calendar overview, yes personally filtered, upcoming events, recent events, waiting assignments, hanging homework needing grades, auto-emails sended by activities, or RSS, ..
If you are starting with e-Learning, many of the other tools fullfill the basic needs of a starter. Step One: try to remember your password, etc..
What if you grow in your needs and get more and more refined wishes for course tuning? Some tools will block your grow, with Moodle Unlimited you can.. On this moment I stay at least two years ahead of the wishes of our 400 teachers and 4000 students in 9 schools.
(o yes, another strong point of Moodle: you can integrate/use the other reosurces on your school and let them work for Moodle: I am in our situation the only admin and still have time left for this forum and thinking about new educational arrangements. (..made possible by the wizzards of Moodle, thank you guys.)
(O yes, I forgot: build in filters for algebra, TeX, multimedia, and, and, and....)
in Claroline/Dekeos/BB/aTutor you organise from a technical point of view...In Moodle you organise from an educational point of view
Yes! Nice summary of the distinction. It'd be really great if someone did some formal research on how quickly naive instructors learned Moodle compared to other systems. Our anecdotal experience is that Moodle is much, much easier for a non-techie instructor to pick up (while at the same time offering enough power and flexibility that the instructors who are technically oriented don't get frustrated).
Yes! Nice summary of the distinction. It'd be really great if someone did some formal research on how quickly naive instructors learned Moodle compared to other systems. Our anecdotal experience is that Moodle is much, much easier for a non-techie instructor to pick up (while at the same time offering enough power and flexibility that the instructors who are technically oriented don't get frustrated).
I have the same feeling as you. Dokeos is indeed more neutral to the used pedagogy.
I have followed the Dokeos and Claroline softwares a little bit and in my opinion Dokeos is much more dynamic than Claroline. Dokeos is fully dedicated to the open source idea: they have a very open mentality, open roadmap, ... and development is speeding up.
Claroline on the other hand has not improved significantly since 1.4. They are now seriously lagging behind on Dokeos. Dokeos has improved a lot since their first version (1.5) I also see that Dokeos has some universities that are using the software: Ghent University (I read somewhere that they have >20.000 users on one normal dell server), Free University of Brussel, Several Highschools, Belgian Government, ... So I think Dokeos is more viable than Claroline and not the other way around.
I have followed the Dokeos and Claroline softwares a little bit and in my opinion Dokeos is much more dynamic than Claroline. Dokeos is fully dedicated to the open source idea: they have a very open mentality, open roadmap, ... and development is speeding up.
Claroline on the other hand has not improved significantly since 1.4. They are now seriously lagging behind on Dokeos. Dokeos has improved a lot since their first version (1.5) I also see that Dokeos has some universities that are using the software: Ghent University (I read somewhere that they have >20.000 users on one normal dell server), Free University of Brussel, Several Highschools, Belgian Government, ... So I think Dokeos is more viable than Claroline and not the other way around.
Apart from the 'front-end' point of views given here I have some serious problems with the technical implementation of dokeos/claroline. I won't go into details here but it just seems that when they started out they didn't really know what they are doing and now are running into problems and spending a lot of time fixing it (if it can be fixed, there where some very structural things done wrong that you can't just fix without rewritting the whole thing).
This has some major consequences not only for using the software but also when you might want to customize or add something, because you have to understand the code and structure. I've made some customizations as a case study for my research project to moodle and I was baffled how fast I was able to finish those. It's a real treat to work with the moodle code.
This has some major consequences not only for using the software but also when you might want to customize or add something, because you have to understand the code and structure. I've made some customizations as a case study for my research project to moodle and I was baffled how fast I was able to finish those. It's a real treat to work with the moodle code.
Karin:
Dekeos does, according to a product tour on their site, have an audio capability that runs in tandem with web slides (German for pages 
) and a keyboard chat for the distant, via web, participants.
Would there be much heavy lifting combining Moodle chat with web slides and a hook to the audio.
Your thoughts appreciated,
John
I like this model. We can refer to Microsoft Producer 2003 and Macromedia Breeze...
It's very helpful for students to learn effectively.
I've been looking at this recently ... the screenshot can be a little misleading. What the Dokeos project actually use is icecast and winamp for one-way streaming from teacher to multiple students. This is external to the web application and you could do it now with Moodle if you wish (and if you are able to set up icecast which requires full permissions on your server).
Being able to share web pages more easily in chat is something I really want to add, though. Ideally we could use a small browser window with an added button in a thin frame that allows you to send that URL to everyone else's window.
Being able to share web pages more easily in chat is something I really want to add, though. Ideally we could use a small browser window with an added button in a thin frame that allows you to send that URL to everyone else's window.
It looks like they might have switched to flashcomm server sometime since this posting. www.dokeos.com. Could be an interesting move?
Richard
Richard
"Yes. You need Flash MX Communication Server.
However, once you get this, an integration into a dokeos LMS install is not
impossible as all is web.
The code of our development is GPL open source. See http://www.dokeos.com/download.php and we sell services around this :
1. hosting of your videoconferencing room
2. Installing a videoconference box at your place. See the bottom of page http://www.dokeos.com/conf.php"
The code of our development is GPL open source. See http://www.dokeos.com/download.php and we sell services around this :
1. hosting of your videoconferencing room
2. Installing a videoconference box at your place. See the bottom of page http://www.dokeos.com/conf.php"
From the discusssion here:
http://www.dokeos.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=16455
The code for wrapping the app up from the flash comm server is here:
http://www.dokeos.com/download.php.
It is actually separate from Dokeos, so it should work fine as a resource.
Now if only FlashComm server weren't so expensive
Last I checked, what Dokeos was doing was putting a slideshow in a frame above a streaming client, with a chat. However the slides were not pushed, the students had to click the next slide manually in order to keep on the same page as the instructor.
A real one-to-many slide+ audio or video push module would be nice.
A real one-to-many slide+ audio or video push module would be nice.
Perhaps this many to many chat java script with web URL push can be adapted to create the real one-to-many slide+ audio or video module.
I recall, it was 8 or 9 years ago, a java applet, called Chat Touring, using frames, that caused all of the browsers engaged in a keyboard chat to call the same web page in the upper frame when the URL of the page to be called was typed in to the chat which was in the lower frame. This set up would do the trick, an audio/visual web cast with chat, with a hook to the audio source. I suggest the scripting for this program as as model because the java scripting involved has not been up-dated to work with the current versions of most browsers. [Chat Touring was developed for Netscape 2.0 when Netscape ruled the roost and was java-enabled and under the terms of the GNU Library General Public License. I believe that it ran on MS Explorer when that browser become java enabled with version 4.0]
Here is an excerpt from an old java scripting book [ http://docs.rinet.ru/JaTricks/ch1.htm ]
"Occasionally you might want applets to communicate with each other between browsers. Several applets already use this technique. One particularly interesting example is Paul Burchard's Chat Touring applet, which provides a fairly typical interactive chat service with a twist-people who are viewing the Chat Touring page and chatting with each other can direct each others' Web browsers. You can type in the URL of a Web page you find interesting and the Chat Touring applet arranges for everyone else's browser to also jump to that page. Occasionally, there are "guided tour" events, where one individual is in control, showing the others a selection of Web pages and guiding discussion about them. The Chat Touring applet can be found at the following address:" [Internet Archive pages substituted here for Paul Burchard's personal pages at Princeton.Edu which have been taken down.]
or tinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/5v2xd
Perhaps what Chat Touring can help in the production of what Martin envisions for a Moodle chat with web slides (German for pages )
Here is how Paul Buchard, then graduate student, described the system upon upon which his web touring applet was based: "Shared Objects System (SOS) is a lightweight form of distributed objects optimized for multi-user, interactive Web applications. Shared objects are essentially `smart proxies' that cache most state on participating clients. More precisely, shared objects appear as ordinary Java objects on the client, with the additional property that synchronized methods will be executed -- and executed in a consistent order -- on all identically-named instances of the same class, across all clients of the same server. Any unsynchronized methods are executed locally on each client. His paper resides in the Internet Archive at:
http://web.archive.org/web/19970607225909/http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~burchard/www/interactive/sos/
The program files may be found, along with some Republican party graphics, on a directory at Republican.Org which used the chat touring program during the 2000 elections here in the United States:
http://www.republicans.org/Chat/
I don't know how long the java script files will stay up there.
Dokeos doesn't work with PHP 4.1.2 even they said it works.
Teemu
Teemu
In fact, Moodle is very easy to install and use. I spend only one time to install successfully but with Dokoes, it's really a waste of time.
I found Dokeos a snap to install - up first time without a hitch, and I'm not particularly technically adept. With Moodle, on the other hand, repeated attempts to install have been without success. I get the same white screen during the install process that others have mentioned, that stops me dead in my tracks.
Chris Hutcheson
Chris Hutcheson
Have you followed the instructions given to the other users you mention?
I vaguely remember getting blank screens back several years ago when I did not have my php / web server configured correctly. Once you get past that "hurdle" I think you'll like Moodle.
A quick search on the moodle.org homepage for "blank page" should give you quite a few resources to help you.
If you want someone to help by replying to your post, you might want to include some more information about your problem. When are you getting the blank page, at the beginning of the installation or part of the way through...
I vaguely remember getting blank screens back several years ago when I did not have my php / web server configured correctly. Once you get past that "hurdle" I think you'll like Moodle.
A quick search on the moodle.org homepage for "blank page" should give you quite a few resources to help you.
If you want someone to help by replying to your post, you might want to include some more information about your problem. When are you getting the blank page, at the beginning of the installation or part of the way through...
After the long page of sql tables being set up during installation - I'm currently checking the PHP memory limit issue with my service provider. I'm trying to do this on an ISP hosted server...I've also taken a look at the way in which my paths are setup in the config file. So far no luck.