Claroline is a free LMS, online learning management system developed in PHP/MySQL , which is an Internet based database programming language. It is originally developed in the IPM, Institut de Pédagogie universitaire et des multimedias of the UCL, Université Catholique de Louvain Claroline. It is a free General Public Licensing (GPL) software.
The teacher training philosophy of IPM is to develop the teacher autonomy concerning pedagogy and, furthermore the good use of technical tools in pedagogy. It is a course based educational tool allowing the teacher to create, admin and feed his courses through the web.
Claroline is translated in 32 languages and used by hundreds of institutions around the world. The software is released under Open Source licence (GPL). Developed from teachers to teachers, Claroline is built over sound pedagogical principles allowing a large variety of pedagogical setup including widening of traditional classroom and online collaborative learning. It is a platform from teachers to teachers.
Key functions:
- Managing documents and resource links for learners.
- Guiding learners progress through a learning path tool.
- Designing and synchronize learner's collaborative works (shared calendar, document area, group management tool).
- Producing online multiple choice quizzes with a quiz generator.
- Providing synchronous (chat) and asynchronous (forum) discussion areas for learners.
- Proposing an effective users and contents tracking on the platform.
Claroline can be downloaded from
http://www.claroline.net/download.htm.
Claroline has been designed for a 20.000 students university. Today, more than 400 organisations use this tool in 30 languages, 60 countries and help to improve it day after day. Some 5.000 people downloaded the last Claroline version (1.7) since its release, in September 2005. That means 100 downloads per day.
