ILIAS: Comprehensive Free Learning Management System For Universities
ILIAS is an open source Integrated Learning management system for web based learning. It is ideal for Universities as it offers many features that can help educational institutes to support e-learning, online collaboration, evaluation and assessment for students. It is one of the earliest LMS that was used by universities and has been in development since 1997. ILIAS is available as a free software under the GNU General Public License and can be run using a server that supports MySQL or PHP. You can also login to a free online demo to test out ILIAS features before setting it up for academic use.
ILIAS Feature Overview
Using ILIAS you can easily move beyond classroom PowerPoint presentations and setup a comprehensive system for online course and group management. This can be quite useful for encouraging online collaboration among students and even teachers via separate groups, virtual classrooms, chat and discussion forums. Moreover, you can even integrate notifications, news and social applications/plugins to further enhance the functionality of your learning management system.
ILIAS Free Online Demo
You can take ILIAS for a test drive by logging in with a demo account. All you have to do is to head over to the ILIAS website via the link given at the end of this post and click Online Demo. This will show you a few pre-defined usernames which you can use to login as a Learner or Tutor. It is worth mentioning here that some of the content in the Demo may appear in German language so you may be better off testing it in a browser like Chrome for automatic translation to English.
Online Courses Via ILIAS
When setting up online courses using ILIAs you can decide which users can join what course and also add a timed notification period with start/end dates and restrict the number of participants for each course. This can be of immense convenience to facilitate online learning with the help of a proper mechanism to offer online courses.
Role Based Access And Control
ILIAS offers role based access (globally or locally) for the resources within the repository. For example, other than local administrators, certain authority can be delegated to other moderators like teachers for controlling some aspects of the learning management system.
Integration of Online Services in The Repository
ILIAS makes it possible to not only create basic text based forums and pages but also enables the integration of web services. This means that you can integrate anything from YouTube videos to Google Maps for e-learning purposes.
The above mentioned features of ILIAS are only the tip of the iceberg as it has a lot more to offer. It is most comparable to Moodle, however whether ILIAS has better features than Moodle is perhaps only a matter of preference and user needs. For more details and to try out the demo for ILIAS, see the developer’s website.
Go to Download ILIAS
