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.

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.

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.

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.

Up until now, if you wanted to display content in columns which are adjacent to each other on a course or category page, you had no other option than to use layout tables. These tables, however, are not really suited to being displayed on mobile end devices and force the user to scroll horizontally on their small screens. It is much more user friendly if your content on ILIAS adjusts to fit the screen width of the device being used. Today's post will show you how to create such a responsive, multi-column layout in ILIAS 5.0 and 5.1 without using layout tables.

Wikis that are intensively used quickly become unstructured and chaotic. While you can, of course, have ILIAS inform you about new or changed/edited pages, how do these pages relate to each other? Unlike Learning Modules, which have content that is structured like the chapters in a book, the pages of a wiki are merely connected somehow or other with each other via links. Up until now, to order the pages in a wiki thematically and make it easier to find your way around, it has been necessary to laboriously create lists by hand and to continuously update them. Thanks to Custom Metadata and automatic page lists, this is now much easier in ILIAS 5.0

The basic principle behind Custom Metadata can be easily explained. As an administrator you can create metadata sets as you see fit and assign these to a wiki. These metadata sets can then be found on each individual wiki page as separate blocks in the right hand column. All users with write/edit permission in a wiki can then add metadata to any page or hide a metadata block if it isn't needed on a page.

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.