The Claroline platform:

an overview
The Claroline platform: an overview

Index
Introduction ..........................................................................................................................3

Platform tools.......................................................................................................................3

File management .............................................................................................................6

Assignment tools ..............................................................................................................6

User / student groups .......................................................................................................7

Discussion forums ............................................................................................................7

Wiki area ..........................................................................................................................8

Chat..................................................................................................................................9

The Agenda......................................................................................................................9

Announcements ...............................................................................................................9

Surveys ..........................................................................................................................10

The multimedia library (Mediacenter) .............................................................................10

Virtual meeting ...............................................................................................................11

Conclusions .......................................................................................................................13

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The Claroline platform: an overview

Introduction

Claroline is a Web Based Course Management System. It allows teachers (professors,

lecturers...) to create and administer course websites through a browser (Internet Explorer,
Netscape, FireFox, Mozilla, ...).
Claroline is an open source system. This implies that there are no fees to pay for installing
it on a WEB server to provide professional E-Learning courses through the internet.
Claroline is written in the programming language PHP and store the data on the database
management system MySQL. Both PHP and MySQL are open source, free downloadable
and multi platform (it is possible to run those products on servers provided with Windows
or Linux operative systems). Someone who is adequately skilled on those products could
easily improve and personalize the platform.
Claroline is improved and updated more or less every 2 months because thousands of
developers all around the world (belonging to universities or companies who use the
platform) continuously propose new functionalities or fix bugs.
The online Claroline documentation is really omni comprehensive and the official forum
allows to solve any problem the platform administrators or users can face.
Claroline is available in 40 languages. It is possible to install once the platform and to
deliver the different courses in several languages.

Platform tools

The following tools are available among the courses:

SCORM compliant learning paths
SCORM is the standard for the Learning object production. Claroline is a SCORM
compliant learning management system (LMS), i.e. every learning objects produced with
the SCORM rules can be run with Claroline.
User friendly open source products are available in order to produce and package SCORM
compliant Learning object without the needs to insert programming language code.
Next figure illustrate the module list of the learning path.

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The Claroline platform: an overview

On clicking over one of the module, the learning object list appears.

The selected L.O. starts on clicking over its title.

Generally three types of SCORM compliant LO are available: audio – video lesson,
Lecture notes and quiz.
Below, an example of an audio-video lesson. This kind of learning object can be produced
easily by a well trained teacher by means of some user friendly software. This implies that
no technical experts are necessary to produce this kind of learning object.

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The Claroline platform: an overview

Below an example of lecture notes. This kind of L.O. has been conceived to allow the
student to go in depth in a particular topic. The production is even easier than the audio –
video lesson because the teacher, after the writing of the document, has just to convert it
in PDF or SWF (Flash) format.

Below an example of a quiz. The teacher can easily produce a quiz by means oh a user
friendly tool embedded in the platform. The teacher can choose among different kind of
questions (single choice, multiple choice, fill in the blank, true/false, …)

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The Claroline platform: an overview

File management
This tool provides a comprehensive mechanism for organising files and links that a teacher
would like to make available to the students. It is possible to make many directories, and to
have directories within directories to enable grouping of files.

Assignment tools
The assignment tool is a publication area for students. The course manager can create
one or several assignments, where the students will be able to publish their work.

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The Claroline platform: an overview

You can create several assignment sessions(different zones of publication), each one
having different objectives or requirements. Publication can be a file or a text, or a text and
a file. Publication can also be made for a group instead of for a single user,...
Students have the ability to modify their work after submission, and the course manager
can give them a feedback about their submissions.

User / student groups

A group is a collection of students under a label (group name) sharing the same tools :
• Forums
• Documents upload area
• Chat
• Wiki tool
This tool allows course managers to compose sub groups of students from all of the
students enrolled in the course.

Discussion forums
The forums tool allows people to post ideas, opinions, and information in an organized way
about the course. Posts are organized in a way that makes it easy for people to find the
information they are interested in, but without having to wade through unrelated
information.
Postings are organized into three subdivisions:
• Post : a post is a piece of information submitted by a single user. It may be a new
post, which starts a new topic, or a reply to an existing post. Posts are typically a
sentence, paragraph, or a few paragraphs.

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The Claroline platform: an overview

• Topic : a topic is a collection of posts. The posts are organized in chronological

order. The idea of a topic is that there is a single post that contains the topic of
discussion. he rest of the posts in the topic are replies to this first post and to other
replies. Topics are sort of like conversations, allowing many people to state their
opinions about an idea, or debate an issue.
• Forum : a forum is a container for topics. Forums often have a general subject that
the topics within are about. For instance, you might have a HTML problems forum,
which would contain topics in which people would discuss about coding in HTML
and telling the problems they meet.

Wiki area
A wiki is software that allows registered users or anyone to collaboratively create, edit,
link, and organize the content of a website, usually for reference material. Wikis are often
used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. These wiki
websites are often also referred to as wikis; for example, the more famous wikis is
Wikipedia

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The Claroline platform: an overview

Chat
The chat tool is used to synchronize work, to have a little distant chat. For longer threads,
the forum is more useful.

The Agenda
With the agenda tool, lecturers can provide information to the students about scheduled
events linked to their course. The events of courses in which a user is enrolled show up in
the My calendar section that gathers all the events in one document.

Announcements
With the announcements tool, the lecturers can display current information to the students
and draw their attention to it. The lecturer can for example remind a approaching deadline,
point out new documents online, or communicate about an interesting conference.

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The Claroline platform: an overview

Surveys
This tool allows teachers to create a survey that will be anonymously answered by
students.

The multimedia library (Mediacenter)

Mediacenter adds multimedia capabilities to Claroline so that teachers can easily publish,
manage and share audio and video podcasts in various formats (flash, mp4, wmv, mp3).
Mediacenter can manage uploaded podcasts as well as videos hosted on distant servers
like Youtube, Google Video or Dailymotion.

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The Claroline platform: an overview

Virtual meeting
The Virtual meeting tool is provided by Dimdim which is an open source web meeting
product with features like Application, Desktop and Presentation sharing with audio video
streaming and video chat.
The different conference rooms can be created directly among Claroline.

Then the meeting can be open on clicking over ‘Join Conference’. The following figure
displays the chat and the video chat tools.

Next figure displays a whiteboard. For example, like in a real classroom , a teacher is able
to write and draw on the whiteboard or ask a student to do this while the other attendees
are watching it.

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The Claroline platform: an overview

Next figure shows a PPT presentation shared among the attendees. Different tools help
the presenter to manage its online presentation.

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The Claroline platform: an overview

Conclusions

Claroline has been developed to deliver online courses but it can also be used as an
online community or an online front office by means of tools like the forum, the chat, the
wiki, the mediacenter and / or the virtual meeting.
For example the platform administrator can create a course, with its respective users,
where the main objective is to provide learning paths and another course where the main
objective is to create a community or a front office. To realize this last task, the platform
administrator has to hide to the final users the specific learning tools like learning paths or
assignment.
In fact, the platform administration tools are very friendly and flexible, so this kind of task is
very easy to perform.

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