International ILIAS Blog

ILIAS is an open source learning platform that is continuously being developed by an active community. The project is based on the contribution of ideas and requirements from real users.

Anyone can help plan and shape the software. Anyone who has an idea for a new function can suggest it directly - even without any prior technical knowledge.

In this how-to, we describe step by step how it works. By submitting a feature request, anyone can contribute to the further development of ILIAS.

While we are all still hard at work testing ILIAS 10, the developers of ILIAS are already looking to the future and ILIAS 11. That means it is time for the Big Project Jour Fixe, the first milestone in the development of any new ILIAS version. Big Project Jour Fixes serve to plan and coordinate larger development projects that will have a lasting effect on the platform. The focus is not on concrete feature suggestions, but rather more extensive plans that either require a lot of time and resources or a large number of developers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.