Moving away from the 'website look' and towards that of an app: ILIAS 6 sees big changes in ILIAS's look and navigation. Hiding in the background, however, you'll still find the tried and trusted open source LMS and all the possibilities it opens up.

107 new features await us in ILIAS 6. The most obvious changes are to do with navigation. This is now more attractive and more useable on mobile devices. The overloaded Personal Desktop has been replaced, its contents having been newly assigned. The main menu has been moved from the top of the screen to the left hand side (on smartphones it will show as a toolbar at the bottom of the screen). At the top of the screen you now have access to a new notification center.

Many navigation elements and tools can be used in ILIAS 6 by opening the 'Slate'. This powerful new drawer can be found behind the tiles of the main menu. As well as direct links to your ILIAS administration and regularly-used content, you can also find, for example, your personal tag collection there. Many pages in ILIAS will also now display a tool tile. Via this, you can access the online help and the page editor tools. When working on assignments, work instructions can also now be accessed at any time via the tool slate. This really helps you keep an overview when dealing with more complex questions and assignments.

All the menu points of the main menu can be freely arranged to suit the user or, if necessary, deactivated. Additionally you can easily create your own tiles with links or content.


When it comes to the content area, ILIAS 6 remains largely unchanged: after login, the Dashboard can be displayed. As before, this allows you to easily access content, calendar entries, mails and much more. Experienced ILIAS users will have no problems finding their way around the rest of the content area either - although they may notice the benefits of increased responsivity in several areas. More extensive changes to the look of the content area will come with ILIAS 7.

The new Notification Center

ILIAS 6 also sees the introduction of a news center/portal, in which all the various types of system notifications are collated and shown in one place. Notifications can currently be generated in ILIAS for the following things:

• New e-mails
• New chat conversations
• Contact requests
• The completion of tasks running in the background (for example the creation of large download packets)
• Received badges

There are obviously all sorts of further possible usage scenarios that can be implemented in future versions of ILIAS.

To-Dos in ILIAS: Keeping an eye on open tasks

A new service in ILIAS 6 collects open 'to dos' and displays them on the Dashboard or in the personal workspace. The 'to dos' can contain deadlines and are automatically generated by various objects in the system: for example open tasks, submitted feedback or the imminent publication of a saved blog or forum entry. This helps ILIAS users keep an overview of the various things they want or need to get done in ILIAS.

LTI and xAPI/cmi5

In order to be able to utilise an even wider range of content in ILIAS and to collate the associated learning progress data, important e-learning standards have been either newly integrated or further developed.

xAPI (Experience Application Programming Interface) is a standard concerned with describing, collecting and storing user activity. xAPI allows you to record and track the performance of learners. The learning activities themselves can be designed freely and imported into ILIAS from external programmes, simulators and more.

The huge freedoms afforded by xAPI, however, overshoot the possible and sensible usage scenarios in a classic LMS. This is where cmi5 comes into play: The cmi5 (computer managed instruction, 5th attempt) standard is an xAPI profile that reduces xAPI's huge number of possibilities down to a level that is sensible for LMS. It defines how the LMS runs and uses content using xAPI as well as how it stores and shares learning progress information. xAPI serves as the communication level between external learning content and the LMS.

The cmi5 standard is based on the experiences gained from having worked with SCORM over many years. In comparison to SCORM, with cmi5 you can gather and share a wider range of learning progress data. Content can be hosted outside the LMS, used offline and even offered in the form of a mobile app. Thanks to the innovative implementation of these standards in ILIAS, it is possible to use xAPI/cmi5 in accordance with data protection laws: user data can be pseudonymised and even, if necessary, deleted outside of ILIAS without losing the learning progress data within ILIAS.

There are also new features when it comes to the LTI standard in ILIAS 6. ILIAS has been an LTI provider for a long time now and can offer content for other LMSes and external applications. With version 6, ILIAS will also become an LTI consumer. This means than even more external applications will run and can be used in ILIAS 6. Previously this was only only available in the form of plug-ins for individual applications, but now you will be able to use all content that fulfils the LTI standard. This means that you can also use H5P content without any problem.

In practice, this means that you can combine xAPI/cmi5 and LTI in ILIAS. You could, for example, start an external learning game in an ILIAS course and upon completion, set a specific learning progress status for the course.

Further new features

• In Courses it is now possible to reserve and book rooms.
• In the Booking Tool, participants can now submit multiple preferences for term papers or presentation topics.
• In Exercises, it will be easier to compare text submissions with one another.
• Categories containing hundreds or thousands of objects can now be tagged and filtered.
• Test questions can be assigned 'lifecycle' metadata. Question pools can be filtered based on this in order to quickly find the required questions or to generate random tests.
• Location data for live trainings can be saved as metadata and therefore be easily retrieved and reused.
• It is now easier to manage, move and delete personal resources in the user's Workspace.
• Page templates can now be used in the Page Editor of ILIAS learning modules.
• Survey results can now be more easily exported as a PDF
• Assignments can now be randomly assigned. This prevents completed assignments / solutions being copied among the participants.
• ILIAS users can have content recommended to them. This content is located in its own section on the Dashboard.
• CLI-setup of ILIAS is now possible.
• A whole range of improvements have been made to study programmes, especially concerning qualifications that need to be renewed periodically (for example compliance training): You can now set processing times for attaining qualifications, certificates can be automatically generated and their period of validity set.
• The User Management can now be accessed according to positions in Org Units. This allows supervisors or superiors to administer the accounts of their staff.
• The most popular column layouts in the Page Editor can now be used even more quickly thanks to new column layout templates.
• Many more objects in ILIAS can now be made more attractive with tile images.
• It is now even easier to publish personal profiles. Thanks to a new checklist it is also easy to set and review which data is viewable for which user groups.

A big step for the ILIAS Community

The wide-ranging changes made in ILIAS 6 were big step for our developers and the user community. Various different teams and individuals all pulled together to make ILIAS fit for the future. The result of this cooperation shows once more the innovation and strength of tried and trusted open source software.


We hope you all have a great time learning with ILIAS 6 and want to thank all of our supporters for their contributions.