Claroline

Claroline is a free and open source collaborative software and learning platform. It carries a GNU license and is published under the GPLv2 open source license. It allows hundreds of institutions around the world (universities, colleges, associations, companies...) to create and manage online courses and collaboration spaces.

Reuses code available in the extensive open source GLP library. Thomas De Praetere created Claroline at UCLouvain (Catholic University of Louvain), with financial help from Fondation Louvain, Hugues Peeters (who gave the well-known name "Claroline") and Christopher Gesché, also funded by UCL (Fonds de pedagogical development). Referring to the logo, it shows the face of Calliope, the Greek muse of epic poetry and eloquence.

An open source platform

It has been disseminated in 36 languages, in around 2,000 institutions worldwide and in more than 100 countries.

It is distributed under the GNU/GPL license. It has been programmed in PHP, in addition to using MySQL as a database management system. It offers availability on platforms such as Linux, Microsoft Windows and macOS, as well as in browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Internet Explorer.

There are 2 versions of this platform:

• Standard Claroline (Free version Open Source)
• Claroline Connect (Payment Review)

History of Claroline

The Claroline platform project began in 2000 at the University Institute of Multimedia (IPM) of the Catholic University of Leuven. It was created by Thomas De Praetere, Hugues Peeters and Christophe Gesché, funded by the Louvain Foundation of the University itself. Regarding the logo, it refers to the face of a Greek muse belonging to epic poetry and eloquence, Calliope.

The reason for the creation of Claroline was due to a bad experience with a commercial platform. With its development, students and teachers had support in their learning, based on their needs and based on their experiences.

In 2004, the Research and Development Center (CERDECAM) belonging to the Belgian Higher Institute of Engineering (ECAM) began to participate in the development of the Claroline platform, thanks to a team that was subsidized by the Walloon Region. In addition, an international group of developers and teachers contributed to the development of the project.

Tools

Claroline works on the concept associated with a course or educational workspace. In each workspace, the teacher has a series of tools to:

• Write a description of the course.
• Publish documents in any format (text, PDF, HTML, video, etc...)
• Manage public or private forums.
• Develop learning itineraries (compatible with SCORM)
• Create groups of participants.
• Composer exercises (compatible with IMS / QTI standard 2)
• Structure an agenda with tasks and deadlines.
• Publish ads (also by email)
• Propose work to do online.
• See the statistics of the assistance and termination exercises.
• Use a wiki to write documents in collaboration.
• Establish exams, questionnaires.
• Perform gamification or ludification.
• Run lists of links.

Pedagogical Principles

Claroline is a platform that is based on teaching-learning principles in which the student is the center of their own learning. Its vitality is based on its pedagogical principles, which founded its development. These principles are:

• Intuitivity. Both students and teachers do not need previous learning to start working with Claroline.
• Flexibility. The teacher has many tools to be able to organize and use them according to the needs of the students.
• Robustez. The new versions that the platform has are tested before making them available to the consumer to avoid possible errors.

Advantages and disadvantages

Advantages

• He's a powerful coach. It can make different tests such as multiple choice questions, selection, matching, tables or classifications.
• It offers a variety of multiple resources. It allows the creation of contents that help to acquire competencies, such as videos, forums, questionnaires, or evaluations.
• He has ways of learning. It provides the student to follow a logical and simple path through learning paths with content.
• He's a skill manager. It allows to create repositories of skills, which, can be linked to courses or people, to see the evolution of those skills.
• It is an open and simple platform.
• It allows to conform each sector, to achieve personalized and flexible aspects and styles.
• It can manage virtual courses in online learning environments quickly.

Disadvantages

• It's unchangeable.
• Courses cannot be exported.
• It has few modules and few plugins to download.
• Personalizations are a little difficult.
• The community of Spanish users is reduced.

Annual Conference of Claroline Users (ACCU)

To encourage the use and development of Claroline, encourage its collaborators to relate and maintain the project, the Claroline community meets every year at the Annual Conference of Claroline Users (ACCU). This gives the opportunity to meet Claroline users. users and developers from different countries and other contexts of use of Claroline, to share their experiences and achievements and to discuss the next versions of it. The first conference was held on May 22 and 23, 2006 in Louvain-la-Neuve, and later they have been held in other cities such as Vigo, where the Claroline consortium was born, Lyon, Saïdia and Chaingy.

Each conference held deals with specific topics, user concerns, future versions of Claroline, a deeper technical or pedagogical understanding of it, educational innovation or the various uses of the platform.

UNESCO honors Claroline

The Claroline Consortium received an award from Unesco in 2007, the prize of King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa for the use of Information and Communication Technologies in education. Due to this, the vice-rector for new technologies and quality, he considered the award as a guarantee for the use of free software that can be accessible to everyone and that will not end up in a commercial company.

Current version of Claroline

The platform launched its latest version of Claroline in 2018, calling it version 12. This latest version is characterized by:

• Improve accessibility, making it 100% accessible to all media. In addition, accessibility is also a strong point, as it has been adapted to people with visual disabilities.
• A coherent and intuitive platform. Now, the interface has become consistent with code and use. To do this, a real-time tutorial has been designed that allows the guided exploration of the platform.
• Provide long-term stability.
• Attractive design. Claroline has received a change of image, being now more attractive.
• The platform has always been oriented to use in education. With this version there has been a breakthrough in the environments that can make use of it, focusing also on the world of work.

Present and future Claroline

Currently a large number of students at the University of Vigo use the Claroline platform on a daily basis through the Tema Program. This program has the function of being a virtual complement for face-to-face teaching, making it easier for teachers to process the contents of their subjects, using the tools provided by the platform. In the future, multimedia will be incorporated with audio and video classes in collaboration with UvigoTV, as well as an intercommunication system between teacher/student. This is intended to attract a large number of users who do not necessarily have to have great skills to use this platform. As is being carried out at the University of Vigo, this platform is being used in other parts of the world, since it is an unknown tool but it is being used more and more.