Introduction

Chamilo is free software, providing a platform for e-learning and collaboration. It is what is often referred to as a Learning Management System (commonly abbreviated to “LMS”) - a popular term used to describe any kind of software platform designed to facilitate the management and delivery of courses and the monitoring of students’ progress.

Fundamentally, an e-learning platform provides you (usually in a teaching position) with means to store and organise your educational materials online, and to share these with students to save them having to carry piles of books back and forth to and from school. But this is only the “tip of the iceberg” in terms of what you can achieve with an incredible LMS like Chamilo. It can offer huge time-savings by taking over a range of repetitive administrative tasks, allowing you to focus on supporting students. It can be used to create many types of teaching materials. More importantly, it can provide students with a range of motivational tools supporting effective independent study at their own pace, as well as a means to interact more completely with their teachers and fellow students.

With a platform like Chamilo LMS, you can easily build courses and configure the platform to make it your LMS¹, LCMS², VLE³, PLE⁴ or MOOC⁵ platform. It all depends on what courses you have to offer, and what configuration options you pick!

www.chamilo.org

How this book is structured

This book is designed to serve as a “hands on” guide. Ideally, you should immediately try out what you read. That way, you’ll achieve a far sounder grasp of what you’re trying to learn.

That said, you won’t find a chapter here on software installation. Instead, we invite you to use our free public demo portal (http://campus.chamilo.org) to try out what’s described in this book. If you want to install your own Chamilo portal, please check the installation guide provided with the software (it’s also worth checking out the references in the Appendix on how to go about installing your own Chamilo portal).

We’ll explain first how to create a course, then take you through how to create content for your courses which generate assessment information for later use. Having assessments implies you have students, so the third part of this book focuses on organising and monitoring students. Finally, we’ll provide a set of example courses to help you get the most out of using Chamilo LMS.

So go and make yourself a cup of coffee, settle down with your laptop, and we’ll take our first steps on the path to learning Chamilo LMS…