International ILIAS Blog

Contributions are now being sought for the 22nd International ILIAS Conference. The conference will take place on 7 and 8 September 2023 at the University of Cologne. The ILIAS community will return to the place where it all began. For it was in Cologne that the first ILIAS version was conceived and developed almost 25 years ago. The city is still very important for the ILIAS cosmos, as it is home to several large installations, the ILIAS Society and several service providers.

While preparations for this year's ILIAS conference are already underway, all video recordings of the contributions from Bologna are now finally available online.

Diverse, innovative, secure - that's how e-learning works with ILIAS and that's also the motto of the 21st International ILIAS Conference, which will finally take place again as a live event next week after a two-year break from Corona.

This year we will meet in Bologna. There, ILIAS professionals will show in several workshops, tutorials and presentations how they implement complex learning scenarios and attractive learnings with on-board tools - and where they elegantly extend the platform with external solutions.

Diverse, innovative, secure - that's how e-learning works with ILIAS and that's also the motto of the 21st International ILIAS Conference, which will finally happen again as a live event next week after a two-year break from Corona. Our largest community meeting will take place in Bologna this year. There, ILIAS professionals will show in several workshops, tutorials and presentations how they implement complex learning scenarios and implement attractive learnings with on-board tools - and where they elegantly extend the platform with external solutions.

Early bird tickets for this year's ILIAS conference in Bologna are available until 8 July. Members of the ILIAS Society can attend for only 290 euros. Non-members can also save money by booking early and get the ticket for 340 euros. (By the way, anyone who wants to join the Society quickly can do so here!

After a two-year break due to Corona, there will finally be another in-person ILIAS Conference this year. To our great delight, Roberto del Mastro from the OC Group is inviting the community to Italy to discuss all topics related to ILIAS and e-learning in an appropriate setting.

Roberto is already busy promoting the event and bringing people together. He has recently created a new interview format: ILIAS Espresso. In public conversations, Roberto talks to members of the ILIAS community. A fortnight ago, the ILIAS Society's managing director Matthias Kunkel started the conversation, followed by Andre Günther and Hannah Ittner from Minervis GmbH.

We asked Roberto some questions about this new format.

The ILIAS Society is wishing all ILIAS users, developers and everybody in the e-learning community a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The 20th International ILIAS Conference will take place on 28 and 29 October 2021. Due to the still unclear pandemic situation, we are holding the conference virtually again this year. Tickets for the event have been available online for some time now.

This week, the conference team has now also published the complete programme. It will be framed by the keynote speeches of two speakers we are particularly pleased about.

This Friday, 23 July, Stephan Rüping from Helmut Schmidt University and Uwe Kohnle from internetlehrer GmbH will be offering an online workshop on the topic of "LTI and ILIAS".

At the bilingual event (German/English), LTI maintainer Uwe Kohnle will first present the status quo of LTI in ILIAS and provide a look at the planned further developments. Afterwards, Colin Kiegel will present a case study from practice and show how learning portals from industry partners can be connected with LTI.

This is followed by a field report by Göran Kattenberg from the Netherlands, who explains cross-platform learning with the help of LTI and H5P. Finally, Bracken Mosbacker takes a look at the future of LTI. Mosbacker is the lead LTI engineer at the IMS Global Learning Consortium and is actively contributing to the development of the standard.

The workshop will be held via BigBlueButton. It will start at 1pm and end around 4pm. All information about the workshop and the registration email can be found in the following PDF.

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.

The developers and various pretesting teams are working intensively on the new version of ILIAS – ILIAS 6. The DevConf in Dresden, has now also given us the opportunity to peer a little further into the future and have a first look at ILIAS 7, for which the topic 'Client-side ILIAS' will play a central role. New developments should lead to (among other things) an offline mode for SCORM and ILIAS learning modules as well as for the Test&Assessment. Another item on the agenda is the overhaul of the Page Editor. While some new elements will already be present in the background of ILIAS 6, the big changes to the Editor will take affect in the next ILIAS version.

While the release of ILIAS 5.4 is still fresh, we are already working on the next version of our LMS. ILIAS 6.0 will introduce major improvements, focusing on three main areas:

The 18th International ILIAS Conference will take place on September 26th and 27th. It will be hosted by the German Social Accident Insurance (DGUV) in Dresden.

In order to prepare an interesting programme for all attendees, we have published a call for papers. You are invited to submit contributions in the following core topic areas:

This new release of ILIAS 5 (download link) brings many major features and improvements to learners around the world. It allows you to easily beautify your content with the new tiles view. No more long lists of materials, no more CSS tricks required.

ILIAS 5.4 also includes a new content style for the page editor. It is activated by default on category, course and group pages, as well as in ILIAS learning modules, wikis and blogs.

Two new tools get introduced with ILIAS 5.4: The Content Page offers a simple way to provide instructions or motivational messages to learners. No need to set up a learning module - simply create a content page and publish whatever your want.

The Learning Sequence allows you to guide your learners through content in a structured way. Teachers decide in which order learning content is presented. The ILIAS interface gets reduced to a simplified look free of distractions. Learners never get lost, thanks to a sequence outline that is always shown to them.

In ILIAS 5.4, all kinds of Learning Achievements - competences, learning progress, badges and certificates - can be accessed in a single place. What’s more, the new Learning History provides an overview of all your achievements in a personal timeline.

Speaking of timelines: The news timeline in courses and groups got vastly improved. You can now post pictures and videos. All course or group members can comment on news items and post reactions (including likes and emojis). A daily mail informs users about any updates.

ILIAS 5.4 also introduces a new type of survey: The self-evaluation presents learners with a questionnaire to reflect on their current status. It’s no longer required to use the 360 degrees survey for this.

Especially learners and professionals from the medical field will appreciate the new support of key feature tests in ILIAS 5.4.

The exercise now allows teams to collaborate on their submissions in a wiki. If desired, teachers can provide them with a wiki template.

As always, the list of features is much too long to rehash in a single blog post. Please have a look at the 109 entries in our Feature Wiki to learn more about the release!

Many ILIAS users want to access their LMS from their smartphones. As ILIAS is responsive, it can easily be used on smaller screens. But there are limits to mobile usage. For this reason, the topic "mobile ILIAS" continues to be discussed regularly. One approach that was developed within the ILIAS community is the Pegasus app: Its users get logged in automatically to their ILIAS platform and they can access documents offline. They can also work with position-based augmented reality scenarios. We spoke to technical board member Timon Amstutz about the app and the upcoming ILIAS developments.

In her keynote at the International ILIAS Conference in Lucerne, Javiera Atenas (Open Education Working Group, London) painted a grim picture of data collectors and data traders in the area of education. We talked to her about data illiteracy, fair metrics and the right to forget.

For a few weeks already we have been offering early bird tickets for this year's ILIAS Conference in Lucerne, Switzerland. If you order your ticket before the June 30th, you save 60 Swiss francs compared to the full price of 450,00 CHF. ILIAS Society members get another discount and can order early bird tickets for just 340,00 CHF.

You can find further information and the registration link on the conference website.

If you already ordered your ticket, please make sure to book a room in time. We expect Lucerne to be fully booked during September. We have prepared a Hotel Booking Service for your convenience.

And if you would like to check the conference programme before ordering your ticket, you can always find the current version on the website.

The 17th International ILIAS Conference will take place on September 6th and 7th in Lucerne, Switzerland. The hosts would like to invite all users of ILIAS, as well as all those interested in e-learning generally, to actively take part in this year's conference with scientific contributions or user-reports.

Contributions can be submitted in the following core topic areas:

The blog post from 2015 on how to create a responsive column layout (English version posted in March 2016) is certainly one of the most often-read posts in the ILIAS blog. It serves as a guide enabling users to create multi-column layouts that work on both computers and smartphones, without the users having to have an extensive knowledge of CSS.

After many months of developing and testing ILIAS 5.3, we’re happy to announce the release of the first stable version. It includes 124 new features, catering to universities as much as to corporate and institutional users.

A new year is upon us – and it will start particularly well for users of ILIAS: the end of January will see the release of version 5.3! This will include a much improved competence management, the new calendar, better support for mobile end-devices in the page editor, staff view and much more...

The rest of the year will also continue eventfully for the ILIAS community. From 30th January to 1st February the society will be present at the LEARNTEC in Karlsruhe, Germany - a great opportunity for all of the trade fair visitors there to learn more about ILIAS. You will be able to find us in Hall 1 at stand G13. After this we will be concentrating on the conception phase for ILIAS 5.4, for which new feature suggestions can be submitted until the end of March. The most important new features will already be discussed at the Development Conference in Halle, Germany, on 16th March. A new board will also then be elected. After many productive years, Volker Reuschenbach and Werner Willi will not be seeking re-election. We can therefore expect some personnel changes coming up.

The large, annual ILIAS Conference will take place on 6th and 7th of September, this time in Luzern, Switzerland. The conference will give everyone a first look at ILIAS 5.4 and the speakers will tell us about the different ways ILIAS is being used after having been around for almost 20 years! November 2nd is then the date of our big anniversary – we will be celebrating ILIAS's birthday!

The ILIAS open source e-learning society wishes all readers a happy new year and looks forward to continue being your e-learning solution for the coming year.

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.

While ILIAS has a very large userbase in Europe, it is becoming increasingly popular in many other countries all over the world. In Japan, Tamoto Shiro is both a satisfied ILIAS user and a multiplier of knowledge. As a contractor, he works with Nagaoka University of Technology as an ILIAS administrator and is also occupied with language maintenance, documentation and video creation. Shiro helps other Japanese users to learn about and use the open-source LMS. We talked to him about his experiences.

At the last ILIAS-DevConf, the Technical Board presented a new Strategy Paper (PDF-Download) that outlined the key points of its future work. The paper has its roots in the ILIAS-Vision that was formulated in 2015. We spoke to the Speaker for the Technical Board, Alexander Killing, about the contents of the strategy and the measures that will result from it.

ILIAS has been a regular guest at the LEARNTEC in Karlruhe, Germany, since 1999. For the first time this year, however, the software was represented by the ILIAS Society itself, as a co-exhibitor together with the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University. Although new technologies such as VR and AR applications were the subjects of large-scale presentations at the trade fair, it was the numerous possibilities that are opened up by an integrated LMS that attracted many enthusiastic visitors to our stand. Using the brand new demo version of ILIAS 5.2, people were able to thoroughly test our software and have all their questions answered.

During the peak times on each of the three days of the trade fair, there was so much going on at the ILIAS stand that the society's representatives, Matthias Kunkel and Fabian Kruse, were hardly able to keep up! Luckily, they were supported by numerous members of the community who happily stepped in to provide information and answer questions. Alongside these informal conversations, the presentations under the motto 'Meet the User' proved to be a huge success: numerous visitors were shown how ILIAS is used at other institutions and which teaching and learning scenarios are especially effective.

As well as schools and universities, this year in particular saw more people from the business sector interested in finding out more about ILIAS. Many companies have recognised that open-source software is often the better alternative to commercial software – not only in terms of cost, but also when it comes to features and security. It seems likely that after all the conversations and the well-attended presentations at the LEARNTEC, the ILIAS community will grow even larger. We would like to extend a big thank you to all guests and helpers who supported us at the fair!

In July this year, you were able to read the first report from the Technical Board which has been in charge of the development of ILIAS since earlier in the year. Since then, a lot has taken place, according to Timon Amstutz, who just recently took over the role of speaker of the board for the next six months. We spoke to him about the new Jour-Fixe process, improved communication possibilities and the plans for 2017.

In the series ILIAS @ home we like to use our blog to introduce you to new and veteran users of ILIAS and show you how they use the software and help to make it even better as part of the ILIAS community. Today, in the eighth part of the series, we are going to take a look at how ILIAS is used at the KROHNE Group.

For years now, ILIAS users have had two powerful tools at their disposal for conducting online exams - Tests and Exercises. In the actual day to day practice of teaching between LMS and classroom, however, sometimes more flexibility has been desired. This is, for example, the case when a student has missed an important test that is a prerequisite to passing a particular course. But suppose the test results have already been published and the course finished – what now?

Up until now, if the tutor didn't want to create another test – for this single student – setting a new Learning Progress status was only possible with considerable effort or trickery. It wasn't possible, for example, to easily integrate an oral replacement/resit examination in ILIAS and mark it as 'passed'. The student was therefore unable to obtain a green status under 'Learning Progress'.

To remedy this situation, there is a new Object in ILIAS 5.2 - 'Individual Assessment'. Using an Individual Assessment it is now possible to register and evaluate the external achievements of individual students and also have them count towards their Learning Progress. These achievements could include oral exams, certificates gained externally or the fulfilment of other tasks outside of ILIAS.

Putting together such an Individual Assessment is really quite easy: you simply add your Individual Assessment as a new object within a course, add one or more users and then, in the next step, save the desired grading. Optionally, you can also add additional notes, for example detailing the content or grade of an external examination.

The assessment can be either saved at first as a draft or as a final result. When an assessment is finalised, the tutor can still view the assessment but no longer change things. The result triggers the Learning Progress status of the user, who receives a notification of this per e-mail.

The Individual Assessment Object will be available on all systems from ILIAS 5.2 onwards as standard.

ILIAS has been online since November 02, 1998 - a pretty long time for a web-based software. Thanks to our active community, we always get new ideas and projects for developing ILIAS. With ILIAS 5.2, the next milestone on our journey is well within reach.

Feeling younger than ever… 

One more post regarding this year's ILIAS conference in Utrecht: The professional recordings of all the presentations given in the large hall (Waterliniezaal) are now available for streaming online.

There is a complete stream available for each of the conference days. If you would like to jump to a specific presentation, please open the player and click on the icon highlighted in the image to the left. This will open an overview of all the speakers.

We hope you’ll enjoy the recordings!

After our written report from this year's ILIAS conference in Utrecht we want to wrap up our coverage with a selection of photos from the event. A big thank you to Onno Bakker and his team for providing many of the pictures!

Every year, the international ILIAS community meets in late summer for its major conference. For the first time, this year’s event took place in the Netherlands, where the Royal Netherlands Army was an outstanding host to more than 180 visitors. In the modern Kromhout barracks near the Utrecht city centre, the participants enjoyed two packed conference days - exchanging ideas, discussing with each other and learning about new e-learning scenarios.

In the series  ILIAS @ home  we like to use our blog to introduce you to new and veteran users of ILIAS and show you how they use the software and help to make it even better as part of the ILIAS community. Today we are going to take a look at how ILIAS is used at Generali Insurance.

One of the greatest challenges in the development of ILIAS 5.2 is – as reported – the conversion to PHP7. This requires us to go through and update the whole source code. Additionally, a whole number of external libraries need to be replaced. We talked to Fabian Schmid, who as a member of the Technical Board is coordinating the work, about the current state of the conversion.

In the series ILIAS @ home we use our blog to introduce you to new and veteran users of ILIAS and show you how they use the software - and help to make it even better as part of the ILIAS community. Today we are going to take a look at how ILIAS is used at the Alfred-Müller-Armack Vocational College in Cologne, Germany.

The exercise object is one of the most popular tools in ILIAS. It allows you to set learners homework which then has to be worked on and submitted as files texts, blog entries or portfolios. The finished assignments or protocols are then collected automatically by ILIAS and presented to you for assessment.

In Version 5.1, the exercise object has gained several small additions which especially make learning together with others easier and more effective. It has been possible to submit exercise assignments in ILIAS as a team for a while. Recently it has become easier to create exercise-teams with much less effort by simply selecting the team members from already existing groups. For example, if you offer a course in ILIAS that contains multiple groups and at least one exercise, then you can assign each member of a group to a team. This team can then work on and submit the exercise assignment together.

The 15th international ILIAS conference will be taking place on the 8th and 9th of September 2016. The hosts this year are the Armed Forces of the Netherlands in Utrecht.

A particular thematic focus this year is on interconnectedness: over a series of presentations and workshops it will be shown how ILIAS can be used productively and effectively linked to and in conjunction with other systems and applications. A second focus will be on the strengthening of communication and interaction when using ILIAS: How can students be further motivated to become active users of ILIAS and work collaboratively?

Further focal points will concern themselves with learning successes and competence management as well as the use of e-learning in the classroom. Towards the end of the conference we will then be taking a look into the future with 'Learning in the Year 2020' – a series of three presentations.

“Classroom Response Systems” (CRS) are becoming more and more popular at higher education facilities. Also known as 'clickers', these systems allow learners to vote anonymously in lectures using mobile end devices. They can, for example, be used to canvas opinions or to test learning success using multiple-choice questions. The responses and answers are collated and evaluated by software. Within just a few seconds, a visualisation of the results is then generated, and, if so desired, projected. This provides instructors with direct feedback from their students which they can then actively integrate into their lecture. Subsequently, these results can then be commented on and discussed.

In the past you often needed special additional devices to use CRS – such as those used in quiz shows on TV. However, thanks to the increasing proliferation of smartphones, laptops and tablets, it is easier today – for example using an ILIAS plug-in! The company 'studer + raimann ag' has recently released the third version of the LiveVoting plug-in, which is available for use by the whole ILIAS community.

With this plug-in it is now possible to include multiple questions within a single ILIAS object. In addition to the two basic question types (multiple/single choice and open questions), two further question types have been funded by the University of Bern and the Zurich University of Teacher Education: The 'correct order' question type, in which participants have to arrange multiple options in the correct order, and the 'priorities' question type, which can be used to get an overview of opinions in which there is no right or wrong.

What is especially pleasing about the plug-in is how well thought-out and implemented it is. It is, for example, extremely easy and quick to create a new question. When that is done, the instructor can activate and close the voting with one click. Participants can go directly to the voting within seconds by using their smartphones and a QR code. Alternatively, they can use a short link (in the format iliasdomain.xyz/vote/1111[1]). As long as the voting is still open, the participants are able to change their choices. The instructor can also publish the results live, if desired.

The current status of the voting is obtained directly from the server by the end devices using pull technology: They continuously ping ILIAS in order to determine if the status of the live voting has changed and then display any changes within the shortest space of time. The pings do not involve a complete ILIAS environment being built up so as to keep the load on the server as small as possible.

Thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign within the the ILIAS community, it has been possible to raise the funds necessary to already offer PHP7 compatibility in the next ILIAS version, 5.2. This success shows once more that open-source projects really are capable of surmounting extraordinary financial hurdles and thereby guaranteeing the sustainability of their further development. Around €150,000 were able to be collected for this project. We are very pleased with the engagement of the community: PHP7 promises significant improvements in performance combined with lower resource usage. All participants in businesses and higher education facilities were aware of the importance of this update, resulting in the rapid success of the financing goals.

At the general meeting of the ILIAS society in Bremen, it was unanimously decided to set up a new body focused on software development: a Technical Board responsible for mainly strategic decisions that affect the long term development of ILIAS. The Technical Board takes over the central tasks of the previous Head of Development position, thereby taking on an important role within the development management of ILIAS. ILIAS Product Manager Matthias Kunkel welcomed this decision: "With the establishment of the Technical Board, the reliability and quality of the development of ILIAS has now been placed on a sustainable foundation".

Behind the decision to create the new board was the simple fact that the increased time demands of the tasks involved were no longer possible for one voluntary Head of Development to handle alone. This was why Alexander Killing resigned from that position after many years in 2015. It is all the more gratifying that Killing is a member of the new board along with his interim successor Fabian Schmid. At the ILIAS general meeting in Bremen both were unanimously voted (one abstention) to the new Technical Board along with Timon Amstutz, Michael Jansen and Richard Klees. The board therefore has an excellent line-up that is ready to master the coming challenges in the development of ILIAS.

In order to find content in an installation, ILIAS offer you three different search possibilities: a direct search, an index search and a Lucene search.[1] Although the Lucene search has to be configured additionally, it is nevertheless the first choice as a search tool for large installations as it delivers accurate search results even with large repositories. The Lucene search is also popular as it allows files to be searched for content irrespective of their format (PDF, Word, Excel...).  Less well known, however, is Lucene's extensive syntax that supports searching with placeholders and various operators. Here are some useful tricks for using a Lucene search!

Version 5.1 sees ILIAS expanded with a new tool: This new tool, called Study Programme, allows multiple courses to be combined into a single superordinate Programme, thereby allowing a complete curriculum to be allocated to a large number of learners. This also works if the learners are not synchronised in their learning or need to fulfil different requirements: The structure of the Study Programme can be branched, weighted and adjusted to the needs of individual users as required.

After receiving many requests from our international community, we’re happy to announce that we will be publishing an English-language ILIAS blog from this year on. Most of our posts from the German blog will be professionally translated and republished here in a timely manner.

Of course, we're also open to publish original content about international ILIAS projects here. Please be in touch in the comments or contact Fabian Kruse (fabian@ilias.de) with your feedback and suggestions.