International ILIAS Blog

English-language blog on ILIAS with news and background information

Report: The 2017 ILIAS Conference in Freiburg

Kruse, Fabian [Fabian] - 20. Oct 2017, 15:41

Interest in ILIAS is growing continuously. In fact, this year, there was so much demand for tickets for the ILIAS Conference that we had to stop accepting new registrations early – all the tickets were sold out and all the rooms fully booked. It is thanks to the outstanding work of the on-site conference organisers that many of the people on the spontaneously-created waiting list could still be accommodated.

An exciting and fully-packed programme awaited the 252 participants in Freiburg. The opening keynote speech by Clive Young from University College London on his 'ABC Curriculum Design' created a basis for lively discussion that was to be continued not only in the breaks – Young also offered a workshop on the subject. This workshop proved to be very popular and went down so extremely well with the participants that immediately after the workshop, a special interest group, the SIG Curriculum Design, was formed, with the intention of translating the available documents into German so that Young's approach can become more widely known in the German-speaking world.

In addition to the official key topics – open educational resources, training and personnel development, learning success and skills orientation, video-based learning and e-learning innovations – e-learning in mathematics proved to be the secret star of the conference. The events on STACK questions and measuring learning success showed approaches on how to make e-learning even more useful for mathematicians. After a long period of reluctance, mathematics is finally beginning to see the benefits of electronic learning – not least thanks to ILIAS.

The numerous other workshops and presentations at the conference also attracted a large amount of interest. In some slots, the conference guests would almost certainly have liked to have been able to split themselves in two in order to visit multiple events running parallel to each other. Luckily, help is at hand – a whole number of presentations were recorded and are available on the conference website on the pages of the individual programme items. Many events were nevertheless overcrowded. Marko Glaubitz's workshop on interactive video in ILIAS proved far too popular even for the generously sized space that was available – showing once more how much interest there is in using videos in teaching.

Particularly exciting for many participants was the first demonstration of the new SCORM Offline Player given by ILIAS service provider Uwe Kohnle and Jean-Paul Manigand from the French Navy, where ILIAS has been in use since 2009 and has established itself against all LMS competition. Today, around 260,000 members of staff in the French ministry of defence use ILIAS. The SCORM-Offline-Player has been brought up to date with the latest web technology and now works on the basis of HTML5. This implementation could be used to enable the offline use of further ILIAS tools in the future with little effort. An Offline-Test-Player is already in planning.

Despite the large number of participants, the conference still kept the informal atmosphere and the community spirit that we have all come to associate with ILIAS. As well as being the case at the actual conference, this was particularly in evidence at the social event that took place in the Wodan-Halle of Freiburg's Ganter Brewery. The panel discussion on the topic of OER and the opportunities and obstacles involved, was almost lost in the general merry chit-chat of the evening. The ILIAS Society's managing director Matthias Kunkel apologised to the panel and was able to see the funny side of it - “The Social Event is, after all, intended to be social!”

To kick off the second day of the conference we were treated to a keynote speech by Dirk Ifenthaler on the topic of learning analytics: 'Can Data Support Learning and Teaching?' The presentation certainly made a number of suggestions on how ILIAS could be further developed – especially with regard to a more sensitive and flexible learning progress functionality.

Every year, a highlight of the second day of the conference is the presentation of the ILIAS Community Award. This year, the award was presented to Florian Suittenpointner, whose incredible knowledge of ILIAS has been of great help to many people. He is not only the author of the user documentation – his expertise which he makes available in the Online Help group has proved invaluable time and time again. Congratulations once more on your well-earned Community Award!

In 2018, after 7 years, the ILIAS conference will once again take place in Switzerland. The setting will be the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts at the beautiful Lake Lucerne. More information will appear on the conference website by the end of this year.

After the huge amount of interest this year, the organisers have a tip for you all – register promptly - as soon as the online registration goes live (most likely in April 2018)! Because next year, there will only be places available for 196 participants. We will obviously let you know in advance, here in the blog, when registration begins!

A big thanks to Elena Kunkel for the photos. Further impressions from Freiburg can be found on the conference website.


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