International ILIAS Blog

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.