International ILIAS Blog

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

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.

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!

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… 

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.

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.