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Machine Learning with Chamilo as LMS

Theodoropoulos Dimitrios

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Abstract—There are many LMS in nowadays. When deciding to share knowledge in public ,someone must have in mind what
exactly he wants. There are many ways, many alternatives to share educational material and a quality comparison amongst LMSs
could work as a safe guide.

Index Terms—LMS, Machine Learning, Chamilo

I. INTRODUCTION

M ACHINE learning is a trend nowadays. It has amazing applications in domains almost unpredictable. In every place where
tones of data are hidden, the manipulations belongs to Machine Learning. Traditional Statistics seems very basic and
cannot give robust regression models in ultra high dimensionalities, So, Machine Learning goes along with Data Science.
The background of Data Science and Machine Learning lies in Mathematics. So we tried to give a starting point for someone
who had never studied Machine Learning before. We did not want just to throw material and notes. We had in mind an
interaction with the student.
Concretely we wanted to mimic modern e-Learning platforms. We liked the idea of the material divided in weeks of studying
and given tests to evaluate the progress. Another great interaction-idea was a forum .Where the students could express any kind
of problem or anything,
All these ideas forced us to search for the best way to implement them. LMSs was the ultimate solution for us. So our task was
to find the most robust and decide which suited to our needs and how we could apply our ideas to it.

II. LMS
A. Learning Management Systems(LMS)
A LMS is a web- application that is designed to handle learning content, student interaction, assessment implements and
reports of learning progress and student activities. Learning content that is online is accessed through an LMS, which sanctions
students to optically discern and interact with learning implements via web browsers utilizing any operating system, computer or
mobile contrivances.
LMS include systems of learning management systems, portals.LMS were created from institutions where they would like to
register the students and monitor their progress, There were many choices for the students to take online courses and in many
cases gain a certification. LMS can also help students to have learning information from course guidelines ,uploading
assignments and downloading marks, active interactions between students and lecturers, interactions between students,
interactions between students and learning tools, sharing knowledge, and taking online exams and quizzes.

B. Types of LMS
LMS can be classified in 3 main types: learning skill tools, communication tools, and productivity tools[1]
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A learning skill tool is a module with which activities and learning tools for students are created. A quiz for example could
have questions and monitor students performance. The teacher can also upload assignments and the students may have a deadline
to submit .
The second category is communication tool. The characteristic of this type is the interaction among student and teacher.
Announcements used as tool ,are used to present information about the classes ,the course or anything concerning the class.
Last ,productivity tools contain calendars ,surveys and others. These systems allow students and teachers to upload or
download files.

C. LMS Platforms
There are two platform types for LMS: open source and commercial. In the first category there are open source like Chamilo,
Moodle ,Sakai, Atutor , Claroline.In the second category there are Blackboard, SuccessFactors, SumTotal, Litmos,
Anglelearning, Geo learning, Cornerstone and ConnectEdu.
We will see some of them:

Moodle
Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (MOODLE) is one of the best and well known platforms.
Developed back in 2001 supports social constructionist pedagogical principle. Some benefits are accessibility and flexibility.
We can see a screen shot from University of Western Attica which uses MOODLE platform for the lessons.
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Sakai
Sakai was developed in 2004.The extra feature among others is that Sakai has been translated in more than 20 languages

ATutor

This LMS supports the personal messages among students

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Chamilo

This is a screenshot from our platform, We will explain the reasons why we chose Chamilo
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III. COMPARISON OF LMS

To compare the LMS there must be determined some evaluation criteria. We chose the following:
Tools intended for generating contents ,communication tools, , tools for collecting and evaluating activities, tools for co-
operation, price.
The criteria are analyzed in further sections [3]:

Tools intended for generating contents :

􀁸 Page
􀁸 URL
􀁸 File
􀁸 Folder
􀁸 Legend
􀁸 Book
􀁸 Lecture
􀁸 Dictionary (index)
􀁸 Syllabus
􀁸 Lesson plan
􀁸 Video
􀁸 Integration (integration with study contents of other LMS)

There are also communication tools used as criteria:

􀁸 Discussion panel
􀁸 Chat
􀁸 Reports
􀁸 Inquiry
􀁸 Comments
􀁸 Blogs
􀁸 Survey (question-form)

Some other evaluating activities criteria:

􀁸 Task
􀁸 On-line text
􀁸 Set
􀁸 Off-line activity
􀁸 Test
􀁸 Workshop (Self and Peer Assessment)
􀁸 Safe Assignment

and at last there are some co-operation tools as criteria:

􀁸 Group mode
􀁸 Wiki
􀁸 Virtual classroom
􀁸 Calendar
􀁸 Internal mail
􀁸 Tracking
􀁸 Statistics
􀁸 Database
􀁸 Language adjustment
􀁸 Certificates
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IV. CHAMILO AS BEST CHOICE

By evaluating all the possibilities of developing our material on one of the suggested LMS we chose Chamilo as best suited
for us. First of all it was completely free. It is a very important avantage for a starter to experiment without any cost in case
something would go not so well as expected.
The second reason was it popularity. We were searching for something that was pretty well known and used from many users.
Chamilo builds on 12 years of expertise. We found the following chart proving the popularity of Chamilo.

And as far as the technical reasons we chose Chamilo we could mention very briefly:
The ease of use :It is a very easy tool to use. This box here exhibits some reasons:

Another reason was that Chamilo is a complete tool: It offers Wiki, Working groups, assignments, exercises, learning paths,
gradebooks, glossary, documents and much more tools..
Chamilo makes content building much easier than others. It organizes the lecturer very well that he can without much effort
divide his material and his schedule in parts that he prefers.
Another reason is the social background that Chamilo builds. It connects people and creates communities that can help each
other exchange ideas or questions. It has exploited ideas from social media to simulate the "feeling".
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Chamilo is also extesible:It has 20 pre-integrated plugins,more than 300 configuration options for customization,capability
of downloading or uploading CSS styles ,theme changing ,automatic maintenance of modules.
The basic reason we chose this LMS was the interoperability. Chamilo can work with many environments such as Drupal,
Joomla, OpenERP, BigBlueButton, Flash,MP3,OGG,WAV,SCORM/HotPotatoes/IMS/QTI and finally with
LDAP/CAS/Shibboleth/OpenID/ Facebook.
We could mention here the Web services that Chamilo offers: In the next diagram we can see how Chamilo is connected with
some concepts:

Last but not least is the robustness of Chamilo: Chamilo can accept 3,500 simultaneous users,580.000 registered
users,19.000 courses,420.000 sessions and 7.000.000 attendances
Chamilo has 14MB RAM per full page load and the Entire package is 60 MB to download.

V. CHAMILO PLATFORM
The platform of Chamilo is really enjoyable. There are 2 ways of using the platform :as a student or as a teacher. The user
after registering with his attribute can see an extended menu page.
This is the teachers' view in welcome page:
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The student may have on the other hand this view:

We can see the following sections:

Course description, Agenda, Documents, Learning paths, Links, Tests etc
We divided our syllabus in 11 weeks of studying as shown:
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So the student can study every week the corresponding syllabus. During the period of studying there are tests in most cases:
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For example in week 8 we see the following question of a quiz:

There are many features and abilities and is very difficult to analyze all of them. We chose Chamilo because of t he interaction
ability between the users. Forums work as links between the students and help them exchange ideas, questions or anything .We
created such a forum for this reason:
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VI. CONCLUSION
Chamilo is an excellent LMS for the needs of Machine Learning syllabus. There is plenty room for improvements, but for the
needs of our project we think that someone would enjoy and learn many things in Machine Learning.

REFERENCES
[1] N. N. M. Kasim, F. Khalid, Choosing the Right Learning Management System (LMS) for the Higher EducationInstitution Context: A Systematic Review
[2]Virginia M.Macentee,Learning managment systems comparison
[3] Petra Poulovaa, Ivana Simonova, Martina Manenova, Which One, or Another? Comparative Analysis of Selected LMS