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Course Platform Evaluation Report
show details | show criteria descriptions
| Products | Claroline 1.6.1Catholic University of Louvain / CERDECAM (Belgium): http://www.claroline.netLast major evaluation update: August 2005 About product The Claroline project was initiated in 2000 at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium) by Thomas De Praetere and was financially supported by the Louvain Foundation. Since 2004, the main code of Claroline is co-developed with CERDECAM, research center of ECAM (Engineering higher school - Belgium). About producer Strengths Weaknesses | |
General | ||
Multilinguality | Authors can set the interface language for a course. This will be applied to all students in the course (i.e. students cannot change it). 30 languages are available, including English, French, German and Italian. | |
Student's Environment | ||
Ease of Use | Claroline is easy to use, with a clean and simple interface. There are some usability problems however, because the back button cannot be used reliably. Also, many elements of a course cannot be bookmarked (a cookie is used to store the current course).
There is also an important issue with course content : there is no access control for documents. Thus, anybody can access a document in a course using its url (some workarounds to this problem are documented on the Claroline web site, but they don't really solve the problem). | |
Compliant with common web technology | No problem on Windows Firefox 1.0.4.0, Windows Internet Explorer 6.0.2 or Macintosh Safari 2.0 | |
Functional environment | Claroline is easy to navigate, with a simple interface. Breadcrumbs show the location in the course. No customization of the environment at all possible. | |
Tutoring and Didactics | ||
Ease of use | The different options available for managing a course are mostly very straight forward. | |
Communication | Communication tools include discussion forums (unthreaded) and chat (web-based). Groups of students can have a private forum, chat and document repository. There is no search function in the forums. | |
Student management | Teachers can create new accounts for students that are not yet registered in the platform, either one by one or by uploading a list of students. They can also create groups of students and fill them manually or automatically. Students can self-enroll in courses and groups (if this has been allowed by the teacher). When a teacher enrolls a student already registered in the platform, a password must still be entered, and no confirmation is displayed. | |
Activity tracking | Detailed statistics are available for most course elements, either individually or globally for an entire class. Statistics (e.g. test results) cannot be exported. | |
Course Development | ||
Ease of Use | Development of a course is fairly easy and can be done without training, with some of the already mentioned limitations : no internal links to other tools in a course, back button cannot always be used. | |
Flexible Development Framework | External tools can communicate with Claroline with SOAP services (this is undocumented and was not tested). | |
Developers support | Claroline offers a 'Documentation' web site, with various manuals (teacher, student) in different languages. It is organized as a wiki, so anyone can contribute (once registered). There are also active discussion forums (educational scenarios, technical problems, installation, etc.). | |
Compatibility with common web authoring tools | HTML documents created with external programs can be uploaded. If set up correctly by the administrator, ftp access to the document store is possible. | |
Assessment | The exercise tool of Claroline offers standard features for assessments. But there are only a limited number of question types (extension by a developper would be possible, since Claroline is open-source, but there is no documentation on how to do this). Also, questions cannot be imported or exported. | |
Support for e-learning standards | Claroline can import SCORM 1.2 conformant packages. They are displayed as 'learning paths', a tool used to create and display structured learning sequences (these can include conditional access based on the scores in previous units of the learning path). | |
Adaptable look and feel | A style allows for some customization of the look and feel of the platform (banners, headers , footers). But not all course elements use styles, thus their appearance cannot be changed. | |
System & Administration | ||
System management | Claroline is based on a php/mySQL architecture, which can be tuned for improved performance. One negative point : as of Claroline 1.5, backup/restoring of courses is no longer possible. | |
Administration | No virtual servers possible on a single installation. Technical documentation is limited. | |