ILIAS

ILIAS

ILIAS Personal Desktop
Developer(s)	ILIAS open source e-Learning e. V.
Stable release	5.1.13 / December 22, 2016
Written in	PHP
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Learning Management System
License	GPL
Website	www.ilias.de

Elias (name, alternate spelling)

ILIAS (Integriertes Lern-, Informations- und Arbeitskooperations-System [German for "Integrated Learning, Information and Work Cooperation System"]) is an open source web-based learning management system (LMS). It supports learning content management (including SCORM 2004 compliance) and tools for collaboration, communication, evaluation and assessment. The software is published under the GNU General Public License and can be run on any server that supports PHP and MySQL.

ILIAS is one of the first Learning Management Systems that have been used in universities. A prototype has been developed since end of 1997 within the VIRTUS project at University of Cologne. On November 2, 1998 version 1 of the learning management system ILIAS was published and offered for learning at the Cologne faculty of business administration, economics and social sciences. Due to increasing interest of other universities, the project team decided to publish ILIAS as open source software under the GPL in 2000. Between 2002 and 2004, a new ILIAS version was developed from scratch and called "ILIAS 3". In 2004, it became the first open source LMS that reached full SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) 1.2 compliance. SCORM 2004 compliance has been reached with version 3.9 in November 2007.

The idea behind ILIAS is to offer a flexible environment for learning and working online with integrated tools. ILIAS goes far beyond the idea of learning being confined to courses as a lot of other LMS do. ILIAS can rather be seen as a type of library providing learning and working materials and contents at any location of the repository. This offers the possibility to run ILIAS not as a locked warehouse but as an open knowledge platform where content might be made available for non-registered users too.

ILIAS offers a lot of features to design and run online-courses, create learning content, offer assessments and exercises, run surveys and support communication and cooperation among users.

A general characteristic of ILIAS is the concept of Personal Desktop and Repository. While the Repository contains all content, courses and other materials structured in categories and described by metadata, the Personal Desktop is the individual workspace of each learner, author, tutor and administrator. The Personal Desktop contains selected items from the repository (e.g. currently visited courses or an interesting forum) as well as certain tools like mail, tagging, a calendar and also e-portfolio and personal blogs.