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Course Platform Evaluation Report
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| 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). | |
uses browser functionality | 'Back' button cannot be used reliably, as it often produces unpredictable results (e.g. commands are often re-executed, context is lost, etc.) | |
browser bookmarks | Bookmarks only work for some elements, e.g. course documents and forum threads. | |
URL access possible | Bookmarks do not work for many tools such as exercises, announcements, etc. | |
in-system bookmarks | No | |
print current page | Ok (no frames) | |
save page on local disk | Ok (no frames) | |
find word in current page | Browser find works. | |
no frames | No frames | |
scalable font | Fonts scale up and down correctly. | |
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 | |
Firefox 1 ok | ok (Firefox 1.0.4, Windows) | |
IE 6 ok | ok (IE 6, Windows) | |
Safari ok | ok (Safari 2, OS X 10.4) | |
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. | |
keyword search | A search function is available for documents (but not in other tools such as forums). | |
configurable environment | No customization of student's environment possible. Interface language set at course level by teacher. | |
effective navigation aids | Breadcrumbs (with links) show the current position in the course hierarchy. Course menu on the right allows for jumping to another tool | |
context sensitive help | There is no context sensitive help for students (only for teachers, and not on all pages). | |
Collection of Tools | Standard range of tools : course description, agenda, announcements, documents/links, exercises, learning path, assignments, forums, chat, groups (with forums, document repository, chat, assignments) | |
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. | |
forum threaded | Flat forums (based on phpBB) | |
forum searchable | No search | |
private workgroup forums | Groups can have their own forum. | |
internal mailing system | No | |
mailing system interoperable with emails | n/a | |
chat | Web-based chat is available. | |
whiteboard with integr. chat | No | |
Instant Messaging | No | |
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. | |
class enrollment by tutor | Teachers can create students accounts, and upload a list of students from a text file. | |
class enrollment by student | The teacher can specify whether self-enrollment in the course is allowed. | |
tutors can build groups | Tutors can manually assign students to groups, or fill groups automatically. | |
students can build groups | Students cannot build groups. The teacher can specify whether self-enrollment in a group is allowed. | |
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. | |
individual page/tool access | User hits are available for all course elements and tools. | |
class page/tool access | Total (class) hits can be displayed for any category of tool, and are available per day, week and month (no yearly view). | |
tracking of individual activity in forum | Yes (number of messages posted and topics started are logged for all users) | |
tracking of class activity in forum | Yes (forums statistics include messages posted, topics started, more replied/seen topics and last active messages). | |
individual performance in tests | Yes | |
class performance in tests | Yes | |
class assignment performance | Number of submissions (but not average grade) is available for each assignment. | |
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. | |
can define course structure | Teachers can organize their course via a web interface. Content structure is a hierarchy of folders, which is managed online. There are no navigation aids in content. | |
up/download of resources and content | Individual documents can be uploaded via a web form (no WebDAV access; ftp access is possible, but accounts must be setup manually by administrator). Zip archives of documents can also be uploaded and decompressed by Claroline, with the folder structure re-created. There is an online editor for HTML documents. | |
Hypertext linking | Relative links between documents work. Links to course tools are not recommended, as they only work within a session (Claroline relies on cookies for storing the current course). | |
Flexible Development Framework | External tools can communicate with Claroline with SOAP services (this is undocumented and was not tested). | |
extensible architecture | Software architecture of Claroline seems modular, but this is not so well documented. | |
support for client side scripting | Javascript works in documents. | |
support for server side scripting | Server side scripting is not possible within course document ('.php' are renamed to '.phps', and are not executed, but displayed as source). | |
server side scripting API | Communication with Claroline via SOAP services should be possible. | |
custom navigation scheme | No custom navigation is possible. | |
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.). | |
basic manual/tutorial for authors | A Teacher Manual is available. | |
advanced manual for programmers | No | |
complete documentation of APIs | No published APIs | |
responsive support | The user community is very active. | |
online user forums | Yes | |
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. | |
compatible with standard web content | - | |
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. | |
Online Quiz Editor | Yes | |
Offline Quiz Editor | No | |
Broad Range of Quiz Types | Somewhat limited question types : multiple choice with single or multiple correct answers, matching, fill in the blanks. | |
Extensible Quiz Engine | No | |
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). | |
SCORM package import | SCORM 1.2 conformant content packages can be imported in the learning path tool of Claroline. | |
IMS-CP import/export | No | |
IMS-QTI import/export | No | |
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. | |
course level look-and-feel | No, look and feel is set for the whole installation. | |
multiple corporate identities | No | |
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. | |
Performance | Standard php/mySQL optimization techniques possible | |
Security | Claroline can be run over SSL. | |
Administration | No virtual servers possible on a single installation. Technical documentation is limited. | |
One server - multiple institutions/faculties | Not supported | |
Flexible Authentication Scheme | Several authentication schemes are supported : internal user database, LDAP, generic DB. Shibboleth is not supported. | |
Documentation | The online manual has one chapter for administrators, but it doesn't cover all aspects of platform administration (some settings are not documented) | |