International ILIAS Blog

“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.

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.