As of August 1st, 2008, the Edutech web site will no longer be updated. Edutech was funded by the Swiss Virtual Campus programme, which ended on July 31st, 2008. Some activities will be taken over by the e-Learning Services group at the SWITCH foundation.
LMS Evaluation Report
show details | show criteria descriptions
| Products | Clix 5.0imc AG: http://www.im-c.deimc information multimedia communication AG Last major evaluation update: Jan '03 strong points
weaknesses
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Student's Environment | ||
Student's Environment | ||
Ease of Use | The look and feel of the platform can (must) be totally customized when it is installed, so to a certain extent, its usability depends on how well this is done. But more generally, the students functions are well organized.
There are some problems (partly due to the frame-based display): browser bookmarks don't work, printing depends on the way the browser handles frames, font scaling doesn't work. | |
Compliant with common web technology | The following browsers are supported: MS Internet Explorer 5 oder newer, Netscape Navigator 4.77. | |
Functional environment | Clix provides most of the standard functionalities of an LMS, with some additional features: guest book for each user, address book, mediatheque (collection of various resources available to all users), who-is-who (list of all platform users with profile), site map in a separate window (facilitates navigation).
A search function is available for descriptions of course components and of items in the mediatheque and the library attached to a course, but not for their contents. | |
Tutoring and Didactics | ||
Ease of use | The tutoring functions found in the "tutor center", which include monitoring student progress, publishing news for the course and using the communication tools, are fairly easy to use.
If the syllabus is planned accordingly, the tutor can give individual students access to selected parts of the course, depending on their progression. Statistics for assessments are done with a separate function (under "Content management"). | |
Communication | Communication tools in Clix include discussion forums, chat (web-based), pinboard, news and the document archive. | |
Students management | Clix is a complete portal solution, so user management is done at the portal level by an administrator. For course registration, there are several possibilities: self registration (with or without confirmation by instructor), or registration by course administrator.
Students groups can be defined, but not within a course. If groups are really necessary, then the course must be duplicated for each group. | |
Activity tracking | Tutors can monitor students' progress from the course syllabus in the tutor center. For each course component, its status for an individual student can be displayed (e.g. unopened, started, completed, number of points in a quiz, etc.). However, there are no statistics for the class as a whole.
Students' use of other elements in a course (i.e. library elements, communication tools) is not tracked. Statistics on quizzes can be obtained with another tool (under "Content management"). However, if the same quiz is used in several courses, results are only displayed globally, and not for an individual course. | |
Course Developement | ||
Ease of Use | The creation of a course with Clix consists of several steps:
While each of the above steps is not too difficult per se, their combination makes course creation a long and complex task, where many (separate) tools have to be used. Also, once a course has started, it's no longer possible to modify the syllabus (this only partly makes sense: adding content at the end of the syllabus wouldn't be a problem when the course has just started). Finally, there is no concept of "folder" to organize contents and/or create a hierarchical table of contents. The content structure is always "flat". Only the user with "Administratorensicht" had the possibility to upload materials. The user with "Autorensicht" was not given this option. [Is an administrator willing to deal with all the metadata that is required? This seems more appropriate for the author to enter.] After many hours of clicking around (the name "clix" is well chosen), it was possible to upload several pages. These were finally made visible to the student in the Medien-Bibliothek, but incorporating them into a course somehow was too daunting a task to take on. This app appears to put a lot of importance on meta-data; this becomes painfully apparent to the user (whose main interest is content) as they are given many more opportunities to edit descriptions than to edit actual courses. | |
Flexible Development Framework | IMC provides the "Clix Connect" framework for the definition of interfaces between applications based on various standard technologies (Java Messaging Services, XML). | |
Developers support | Three manuals (PDF format with table of contents) are available: "Front Office" (for students and tutors), "Back Office" (for course authors and administrators) and "Reference" (describes all functions).
The first two are organized in the same way as the menus in the platform, which makes them easy to use as reference. But there are no real tutorials describing for instance the process of creating and setting up a course. Currently, support is only available by phone or email. Clix plans to setup a support-portal soon (with forums and other kinds of information). -Documentation entitled "Bedienungsanleitung Backoffice" 1.0 is a very large document (386 pages) with no apparent quick overview of the steps required for authors/administrators to create a course or upload course material. Neither the Clix FAQ nor the "Clixionary" were available. The link from the user interface to "Über Clix" sends you to an advertisement page for Clix. | |
Compatibility with common web authoring tools | Many kinds of contents can be inluded in Clix courses, including:
If an author wants to integrated content consisting of a collection of interlinked documents, including images, style sheets, Flash animations, etc., then zip archives are the only workable solution. But this has its downsides: content is displayed in a separate window, the author must provide his/her own navigation, and only the entry page of the package is tracked. Since Clix doesn't provide ftp or WebDAV support, updating content pages is a bit tedious: each time, the author has to go through a form to re-upload the required file(s). | |
Assessment | Clix offers a fairly broad range of question types: table (a table of text/images where the student must fill in the corresponding missing fields), matching, image zone, free text, yes/no, multiple choice, fill in the blank, and ranking.
Questions are first created in the question manager, and can then be used in any quiz. Another type of assessment is also available: exercice sheets. These contain several exercises, where each exercise consists of several documents: questions, additional information, the teacher's solution, help for corrections, etc. Exercise sheets can be used in communities (Lerngruppen), but not in regular courses. In the tutor center, tutors find the results of each student for a quiz, but without details on scores for individual questions. And global statistics on quizzes are found under "content management", not in the tutor center. There is also a separate "evaluation" tool that can be used for course evaluations. The following question types are available: scale, multiple choice and free text answer. | |
Support for e-learning standards | Regarding e-learning specifications, Clix supports AICC CMI Level 1. For other specifications, there will be a discussion within Clix's HEEN (Higher Education Elearning Network) as to which specifications should be supported. | |
Adaptable look-and-feel | The look and feel of the platform, which is defined when the platform is installed, can be totally customized according to the customer's requirements. Customizations can also be done for each "Mandant" through a style sheet. | |
Multilinguality | Clix currently support Englisch, French, German, Italian and Spanish. | |
XML support | - | |
Migration of current WebCT courses | - | |
System & Administration | ||
System management | - | |
Administration | Clix supports the concept of "Mandanten" (and sub-Mandanten). A Mandant can for instance be a university, and sub-Mandanten could be institutes or schools in the University. Each Mandant can have its own courses. | |
Flexible Licensing Model | - | |
Technical Architecture | Clix server is a Java-based solution (platform-independant). | |
