A frequent question I’ve been asked is why, when installing Dokeos on a local computer, then trying to see it from another computer, the styles are broken (the homepage appears as a list of links from top to bottom).

This is all a question of Name Resolution (or DNS).

How you did it

The initial problem lies on how you did the installation on your local computer: you downloaded Dokeos, then took the easy way and installed it on “http://localhost/dokeos/”, or “http://127.0.0.1″, or even your local IP “http://192.168.0.15″ for example. Didn’t you?

Well, Dokeos remembers that, and asks you, during the installation process, what URL you want to access your portal with. You remember that?

Why this is a problem

As Dokeos remembered it, it will now serve the future pages as if they were starting with http://localhost, or whatever name you gave it during the first install. You can check that, from the other computer, by pressing CTRL-U in your navigator. You will see links like this for the query to the stylesheet (CSS): http://localhost/dokeos/main/css/dokeos_blue/default.css. Well, guess what… “localhost” for the secondary computer is not equal to “localhost” for the main computer. In fact, “localhost” on the secondary computer is pretty much itself, so he’s trying to look like this: http://myself/dokeos/main/css…

This means that the secondary computer is expecting Dokeos to be installed locally as well, which, in general, is not the case. If it was the case, you would probably get even more problems in the current situation anyway.

How you should do it

The *best* solution is to give the first computer (the server) a public name. This public name can be a public subdomain name (like courses.yourinstitution.com for example), but this implies an access to defining such a name. This name will be permanent and equal for all, so everybody will know where the computer is and you will define this subdomain name at the moment you install Dokeos, then use it with all the other computers. If you don’t have a permanent internet connexion, however, and you use an external domain name server (the one from your internet service provider for example), this configuration will not work.

The second best solution is to have a local name server and define a name for the Dokeos server on that local domain name server. This works like above except you don’t need an internet connexion for that to work. Sometimes, the router can act like a name server (see your router’s documentation).

The third solution (which is not one of the best one, but still works in a closed environment) is to make sure the server has a fixed, permanent IP address, and define a unique name for the Dokeos server (like say: “www.dokeos.local”) then define this name on every computer (including the server).

Under Linux, this is done by defining a line with the fixed IP address of the Dokeos server, a space, and the given local domain name (www.dokeos.local for example) in the /etc/hosts file (you need root permissions to edit this file).

Under Windows, the same file exists with the same format, but you have to look a bit deeper to find it: C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts.

Don’t hesitate to report if you found a better solution.

We deal in “LAMP” Technologies.

We are expert in Application development & Customization of Open Source platforms.

Our coding teams have a lot of experience in building web applications for e-learning, e-commerce, content management, realty, CRM and other domains. We are also skilled in modifying and integrating popular open source applications .

Our work Specialty:

1- PHP and Mysql .
2- Full Joomla Customization (Theme ,Component,Module,Plugins).
3- Full Drupal Customization (Theme,Modules).
4- Full Moodle Customization (Theme, Modules).
5- Full Magento Cutomization.
6- Joomla + Moodle Integration.
7- Drupal + Moodle Integration.

For development work we put in a lot of effort to work together with clients to understand and clarify scope. Thereafter, we adhere to a transparent, process-driven development methodology:-

- Analysis
- Construction
- QA
- UAT

Url : www.maantech.com

We are always ready for working with you.

1. Descargar, en su máquina, la última versión de Dokeos desde, por ejemplo, http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-latest.tar.gz
2. Descomprimir el archivo
3. En CPanel, crear un subdominio (es más limpio pero a veces no se puede, depende de su cuenta de host). Por ejemplo, si usted posee el dominio “somoslatinos.com”, declarar un subdominio “aula.somoslatinos.com” dentro del menu Dominios -> Subdominios
4. En FTP, subir los archivos de Dokeos dentro de la carpeta /public_html/dokeos (relacionada al punto anterior con el subdominio). Este paso puede tomar mucho tiempo. Sea paciente. Si la conexión se corta en el medio, es muy probable que resulte en errores más tarde con su instalación de Dokeos. Prueba evitarlo a todo costo y, si es necesario, de subir los archivos desde otra conexión a internet para evitar el corte.
5. Ir con su navegador en su subdominio (ej. http://aula.somoslatinos.com). Si todavía no se ha acabado la descarga de archivos, verá una lista con título “Index of”. Esto indica que todavía no están presentes todos los archivos necesarios. Mejor espere, todavía.
6. Crear una nueva base de datos en la opción MySQL Base de datos, “Crear nueva base de datos” (indicar por ejemplo “dokeos”, que estará modificado para agregar un prefijo, por ejemplo “somoslatinos_dokeos”).
7. Crear un usuario que tenga acceso a esta base de datos, dentro de la opción “MySQL Base de datos”. Por ejemplo, un usuario “dokeos” con una contraseña diferente y difícil de adivinar. El usuario será modificado a “somoslatinos_dokeos”. Finalizar agregando este usuario a la base de datos somoslatinos_dokeos, usando la opción “añadir Usuario a Base de Datos”. En este paso se le pedirá que permisos tiene. Seleccionar todos. NO OLVIDARSE de este paso, es muy importante.
8. A este punto, debería poder conectarse a la pagina principal del subdominio (en este ejemplo: http://aula.somoslatinos.com) y ver la página de bienvenida de la instalación de Dokeos.  Un manual de instalación le permitirá ir adelante con la instalación (de la cual el más complicado y importante paso es la configuración de la base de datos, donde se tiene que escojer, en las opciones avanzadas – ver sección desplegable de parámetros avanzados -, de usar una sola base de datos: la que usted acaba de crear).

Posible problemas

No se ven las imágenes

Esto puede ser debido a un problema de permisos de acceso a los archivos de imágenes, o a un problema de configuración de .htacess. Por ejemplo, usted podría haber instalado Dokeos dentro de una subcarpeta de su public_html/ (en la carpeta public_html/dokeos/, por ejemplo). En ciertos casos, el CPanel puede haber construido un .htaccess en la base del public_html/ que esté impidiendo a las imágenes de ser usados directamente dentro de subcarpetas.

En un caso que ví hace poco, el .htaccess de la base estaba definiendo reglas del módulo Rewrite de Apache que estaban bloqueando las imágenes. Fue suficiente crear un archivo .htaccess en la base de Dokeos indicando solamente “RewriteEngine Off” para desactivar el efecto negativo. No obstante, esto solo es *un* caso particular. No puede ser usado siempre.

El .htaccess puede contener todas las opciones de Apache, que son cientos de opciones, por lo que no hay una forma breve de aconsejarlos si esto es el problema, y por lo cual proponemos servicios de soporte con costo para ayudarles, así que un servicio de alojamiento a US$50/mes con backup y seguridad, para que no tengan que preocuparse de estos problemas. Para más información sobre estas fórmulas:  info@dokeoslatino.com

No se puede crear cursos

O mejor dicho, se puede crear cursos pero no se puede entrar en ellos. Esto también está debido a un problema de permisos sobre la carpeta “courses”, o a una regulación de seguridad del servidor que implica que las carpetas deben ser creadas con ciertos permisos para poder ser vistas (no los permisos más amplios). Para cambiar los permisos de las nuevas carpetas de cursos, puede usar la sección “Seguridad” de la página de administración de Dokeos. En general, es tan simple como cambiar un 0777 a un 0755, por ejemplo (que impide a los demás usuarios del sistema modificar este recurso pero sí leerlo).

Dokeos 1.8.6.2 will ship a new beta tool, the time tracker for exercises. It’s been asked for since 2004, as far as I can remember working on Dokeos, but I have always refused to start implementing it, mostly because it was a risky business to have to support a JavaScript widget with the lack of portable JS libraries.

Since the adoption of JQuery globally in Dokeos though, things have changed, and although *nobody* financed that development (which I am quite disappointed about, actually), we have taken the responsibility to put it inside 1.8.6.2.

This is one more big step in the run against Moodle, which seemed to loose speed constantly for the last two years (see activity graph on Ohloh), and for which we were always getting justifications like:

• more flexible (we still have some work to do on the graphical flexibility here)
• supports UTF-8 (technically, we now do this as well, and support might actually be better than in Moodle, we didn’t check that)
• allows for timed exams (1.8.6.2 will support that)
• is faster/more efficient (I am still waiting for data to prove argument and I seriously doubt it)

We are also working constantly on improving the time and scores tracking overall, as this is a highly sensible matter for most of us.

The rest of the features set that varies is generally considered moot (=not important/useless) by users in many cases, but we have a bunch of things that Moodle doesn’t have yet.

Now as we prepare for Dokeos 2.0 and Moodle 2.0, I’m growing more curious about how this is all going to work in the future.

This article is clearly at level “piece of cake” for those of you working day to day with UTF-8 and unicode headaches, but I have plenty of problems with my own team to explain why they should never put a string like this:

$SomeString = “This value must not be inferior to”;

in the Dokeos translations system, but they never learn

This would later appear in the code as something close to:

echo get_lang(‘SomeString’);

and this would make it available in all the supported languages (if translated by a good will in his own language).

So here is an attempt at explaining clearly  what it’s all about, and why this kind of expression should be avoided at all cost in a translation system.

First of all, let’s delve a bit deeper into the string above, to make sure we all start on the same bases. The idea is to have a final string in the user interface which will look like this:

This value must not be inferior to 25

OK, you all get the point?

Now where is the problem in that? Well, the problem is that not all languages work the same or, better said, have the same sentence construction rules. The same sentence would be translated in the following ways:

French: Cette valeur ne peut pas être inférieure à 25

Spanish: Este valor no puede ser inferior a 25

Dutch: Dit waarde macht niet minder dan 25 zijn

Did you see what just happened? Yes, “25″ was not the last word of the sentence! So, how do you fix that now with your string, huh? You’re pretty stuck now, aren’t you? Well, that’s why I’m writing this. Dutch is not the only language with this kind of structural change. Japanese would most probably put 25 (ni-juu-go) right in the middle of that sentence.

Now, I hope you already learnt something right now. And I hope that what you learnt is that you have to think a bit more and be a little less egoistic when programming. A lot of people might use your program (particularly if it’s open-source), and a huge lot of these will not speak a work of English or French or even Spanish, so you will have to find new ways to do things properly.

One of these new ways is to use the nice sprintf() function in PHP (in our case, of course), and pass parameters in the form of %s (string) or %d (decimal) inside your string.

For example, the previous string could now be stored in a language file this way:

$SomeString = “This value must not be inferior to %d”;

When translating this string to Dutch, I would write:

$SomeString = “Deze waarde mag niet minder dan %d zijn”;

Did you see that? Now the translation is completely up to the translator. No more problem of positionning the number at the end of the string.

Then you would call it from your script not this way:

echo sprintf(get_lang(‘SomeString’),’25′);

Et voilà! Now you know why I’m upset when I see a partial string translation… So let’s make it a better world for all translators around! Let’s give them multilingual-ready strings to translate!

Note: Purists will tell me that I should use printf() instead of echo + sprintf(), and also that I should use %d and not %s, and I would agree, but I’m just trying to show a one-simple-step change between the previous form and this one.

Thanks for reading.

I have updated my system early to Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and, to my surprise, there is a little change that could cause dramatic problems in Zlib (library dealing with compressed data). The gzopen() function has been changed to gzopen64(). This means that all calls to gzopen() in the PHP bindings for that library should probably be modified to use gzopen64().

In Dokeos, we use PclZip 2.6, which doesn’t use gzopen(), apart from a check to see if the zlib extension is installed or not. I have reported the problem to PHPConcept (the guys in charge of the PclZip development) to report the problem. Meanwhile, if you are using PclZip in your PHP app and it needs to run with a recent version of zlib (I have zlibc  0.9k-4), you will probably have to edit the PclZip library file and change gzopen() to gzopen64().

For those of you who never really understood how Dokeos sessions work, here is a nice diagram (composed by Michela a long time ago) of the whole idea.

Sessions in Dokeos

I have also added a wiki entry to explain the concept a little better: http://www.dokeos.com/wiki/index.php/Sessions

Este mapa de campus virtuales de software libre, así como toda la información que presentamos en esta web, son fruto del trabajo desarrollado en el marco del proyecto de investigación PLATAFORMAS DE CAMPUS VIRTUAL CON HERRAMIENTAS DE SOFTWARE LIBRE: ANÁLISIS COMPARATIVO DE LA SITUACIÓN ACTUAL EN LAS UNIVERSIDADES ESPAÑOLAS que ha sido financiado por el Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación a través de la convocatoria para la subvención de acciones con cargo al programa de Estudio y Análisis (referencia EA2008-0257), destinadas a la mejora de la calidad de la enseñanza superior y de la actividad del profesorado universitario en el año 2008.

En el contexto de la enseñanza superior en España se ha producido en los últimos años un movimiento significativo de cambio en cuanto a las herramientas de campus virtual que se venían utilizando, encontrándonos en la actualidad con gran número de universidades que apoyan sus campus virtuales en herramientas de software libre.

Nuestro propósito general es aproximarnos a la realidad de los campus virtuales de software libre en las Universidades Españolas, de tal manera que se ha elaborado un mapa interactivo web en el que se puede conocer qué aplicación de campus virtual utiliza cada universidad española a través de diferentes criterios de búsqueda.

Este proyecto ha sido dirigido por la profesora Mª. Paz Prendes Espinosa, Directora del Grupo de Investigación de Tecnología Educativa de la Universidad de Murcia.

Informe en formato PDF aquí <-

Informe online aquí <-

In a recent meeting with the Dokeos 2.0 team, I realized that sometimes things are not quite evident. One of these cases that can only be understood with experience is that there’s no use in allowing a user to upload files and keep the true filenames on the server’s disk. In fact, it is quite a bigger problem to do that instead of changing the filenames and storing files as hashes.

Reason 1: Avoid security issues

When uploading a file to the server, you will have filters in place (won’t you?). This being said, you would have to be very good technically to know exactly what kind of files represent a danger to your server if accessed directly. For example, a user could upload an example PHP script called, let’s say, “test.php”, and this script could contain malicious code. If a user is able to upload such script and the same (or another) user can access that file directly (like http://www.example.com/media/test.php), then the access itself will trigger the execution of this script on your server and the implied malicious effect.

Now, what people know a little less, is that a file called “test.php.txt” can also be interpreted as a PHP script (you didn’t know, did you?).

There are loads of other examples of file extensions that are dangerous to your server in one case or another, but the idea is always the same. You don’t want users to be able to upload these files “as is” and be able to access them without your approval. You could use .htaccess rules, but then you would have to rely on the fact that the server you’re going to install your application to actually manages these .htaccess rules. In free software, that’s something complicated to do (or at least if you do it, it becomes complicated for the user to install it).

Reason 2: Character encoding

Reason 3: Character casing

Reason 4: Updating filenames

Reason 5: Duplication

Reason 6: Identifying duplicates

Reason 7: Load splitting

Disadvantages

When uploading inter-related files (like in the case of an HTML document with CSS and images, for example), you will have to ensure that single files can be queried through your server’s scripts normally (not by their hash names). This requires a bit more work, but is easily done through a redirection to some “download.php” script if available (there are other possible ways).

In Dokeos 1.8.6, we have removed (or better say “hidden”) the official code field from the open registration form. Well, that’s only logical since we suppose a normal, already registered, student will be registered through an Excel import sheet or some automatized way. But that might cause problems to some of you, so basically, the only thing you need to do to re-enable it is

• edit main/auth/inscription.php
• look for “official_code”
• uncomment the section containing this term

That’s it.

Las empresas pueden minimizar sus costos de capacitación elaborando o adquiriendo cursos virtuales. Cada vez que llega un nuevo trabajador empieza una etapa de capacitación que se encarece de acuerdo al nivel de especialización y complejidad del conocimiento. También, un factor crítico es la cantidad de personal a capacitar. Con los cursos virtuales se asegura que el buen nivel se mantenga en cada una de las capacitaciones.

Asumir estos costos de capacitación es una práctica muy rentable por la calidad que alcanzan los recursos humanos. Si vemos los negocios en grande siempre pensaremos en muchos trabajadores:
- Vistadores médicos de laboratorios
- Agentes de venta en divisiones comerciales
- Talleres de manufactura
- Encuestadores y soporte telefónico
- Atención al público en una cadena de tiendas

Una menor inversión y un mejor aseguramiento de la productividad son dos efectos evidentes de los cursos virtuales bien gestionados.

Las personas pueden obtener prestigio profesional o beneficios económicos inmediatos cuando difunden conocimientos propios o de terceros. Elaborar cursos virtuales por sus propios medios o encargando su desarrollo son vías ideales para obtener estos beneficios en repetidas ocasiones.

- Autores de manuales de procesos
- Editores de contenidos educativos
- Encargados de desarrollo profesional

Sin embargo, asegurar el seguimiento de dichos cursos se hace de forma más eficiente todavía usando un sistema centralizado y estandarizado.

Pronto se dictará la charla internacional “¿CÓMO CREAR, IMPLEMENTAR Y ADMINISTRAR CURSOS VIRTUALES?“, la cual se levará a cabo el viernes 28 de Agosto, de 6pm a 10pm, en las instalaciones de la Cámara de Comercio de Lima, en Perú. El ponente es Yannick Warnier, confío personalmente en su profesionalismo. Él es líder de desarrollo del mejor sistema para cursos virtuales (Dokeos, herramienta web de e-learning) y ha estado envuelto en realidades de educadores, emprendedores tecnológicos, empresarios, etc.

Para la inscripción y solicitud de mayor información está el e-mail michela.mosquera@dokeos.com y los teléfonos +511 7195191 y +511 7195192.

Se está programando el mismo taller en Santiago de Chile para la semana del 21 de Septiembre.

Más información de contacto:

Ing. Michela Mosquera | Gerente Administrativa | Dokeos Latinoamérica
TEL: (511)7195191 | FAX: (511)7171880 | www.dokeos.com/latino
Twitter: @michela85 | Skype: dokeoslatino| Gtalk/MSN: dokeoslatino@gmail.com
Conozca lo que investigamos: http://dokeoslatinoamerica.wordpress.com/

A question that often comes around is “Sending e-mails with Dokeos don’t work! How do I fix that?”

This is generally due to the fact that e-mails are supposed to be sent from the server where Dokeos is hosted. However, if e-mail sending is unavailable, or if you want to configure your own account, have a look at main/inc/lib/mail.conf.php and update the settings to tell it to use ’smtp’ and then give it your account details (like smtp.yahoo.com, your login and your account for example).

Beware that, if it is used to sent massive e-mails, then your account might be suspended for some time by your e-mail provider.

I always loved drawing Gantt diagrams at school, it kind of made sense to try and organize human resources for a big project. However, due to the small teams and the relative shortness of our projects, or my position in their development that wasn’t high enough, I never actually got to make a really useful Gantt (what’s a Gantt worth if it’s only for 2 or 3 people for 3 weeks, anyway?).

Well, this month, as always, everybody told me there wouldn’t be any development and then all of a sudden we had to deal with 6 projects that have to be finished by the end of August. So having like 10 technical employees now, I really *felt* the need to organize something in a diagram.

As I wanted to be able to reuse it, I just thought that, instead of having a plan of paper, I would be drawing my first useful Gantt in a tool to do that. We’re using RedMine to build our projects at the moment, and it’s very nice, but the Gantt that it draws are per-project, which is also fine, except that in my case I want to be able to draw a Gantt for multiple projects that will be executed during the month of August. So nevermind, I’d be using GNOME Planner (ex MrProject), because it is included in the Ubuntu repositories, and I used to use it during my studies to generate the useless ones.

After defining the resources, their hourly cost, the tasks and their duration, I went on defining inter-task dependencies and use of resources. Well… the conclusion is that it is really useful! I never thought we would be busy for so long with the current projects, and this certainly allows me to plan ahead and refuse to start working on any additional task before we finish the other ones… Here’s what it looks like:

Gantt for August

Long live the Gantt (it certainly doesn’t answer all my organisational headaches, but it does answer its own little part fully).

En dokeos hemos estado preparando una serie de video tutoriales en nuestro canal del youtube con el fin de difundir la simplicidad del sistema para el usuario y resolver dudas sobre la creación de ejercicios y otros temas, es ideal ello ya que ayuda a difundir de manera sencilla el uso  de esta suite de aprendizaje de código abierto.

Dejo algunos enlaces de interés de estos video tutoriales, si desean algunos tutoriales sobre temas  específicos  , solicítenlo y en la medida de la disponibilidad del tiempo los iremos preparando.

Video tutorial Dokeos – Ejercicios herramienta respuesta multiple

Video tutorial Dokeos – Ejerecicios herramienta respuesta única

Video tutorial Dokeos – Ejercicios herramienta interactiva

Video tutorial Dokeos – Herramienta Ejercicio – herramienta de correspondencia

En Dokeos, hay *muchos* tipos de errores. Cada tipo de error genera su propio mensaje de error, traducido en el idioma del usuario. Aproximadamente, tenemos (supongo) algo de 500 errores distintos.

El objetivo de esta nueva tarea es de hacer una lista de todos los casos de error y categorizarlos por tipo de error y por contexto. Imagino una escala de 0 a 9 para la gravedad, y una sub-escala de 0 a 100 para el contexto, más unos números libres para variantes.

Algunos ejemplos:

• 014113 (0-14-1-1-3): Error de permisos (0) al subir un archivo en la herramienta de trabajos (14) por un usuario de rol profesor (1) dentro de una carpeta (1) que ya tiene otros ficheros (3).

Osea… una propuesta de clasificación sería:

1. gravedad
2. herramienta
3. rol
4. ubicación
5. contexto/variante

Como nadie en nuestro equipo tiene actualmente el tiempo de hacer una clasificación de todos estos errores, me imagino que habrá alguien interesado en este tema… el valor agregado para Dokeos es real: no solo podremos tener una idea clara de como se presentan los errores, y uniformizar nuestra manera de manejar estos errores (usando, por ejemplo, una misma librería para gestionar los errores de permisos al subir archivos de todas las herramientas), sino también podremos evitar de pasar cadenas de caracteres en el URL o en los formularios (cadenas de caracteres son mucho más vulnerables a los ataques de seguridad que lo son los enteros).

Podría ser en el marco de un convenio con una universidad.

Se busca un practicante motivado, no pagado, para trabajar en un horario razonable durante 2 a 3 meses, de preferencia en Lima, Perú (más conveniente para apoyarlo), para realizar un catálogo de errores en Dokeos y proponer un ordenamiento. Su nombre estará indicado muy claramente en los contribudores del software libre popular Dokeos, y el podrá presentar este trabajo como trabajo de fin de estudios si adecuado (esto se tendría que conversar con su entitad educativa).

A long time ago, I developed a loginshare script for a customer, that I think can now be shared with the community. I don’t know much about LoginShare, and the truth is that their forum doesn’t tell me much either, but based on a similar script, I developed the following script to use Dokeos 1.8.5 with it. Just in case it would be useful to anyone… (it certainly will be more useful this way than abandoned in one of my directories). You can download it in PDF.

loginshare.dokeos.login

I just commited to the Dokeos SVN a little feature to allow for the inclusion of your RSS feed in your profile. This is a little guide on how to enable this (there’s no other guide available at this point and the interface will not suggest you to do something you don’t even know is possible in Dokeos).

First, get to the admin panel (as admin, obviously) and go to the profile link under the users section.

Once you get on the new screen, click “Add new field” and define a new text field of which the ID *must be* “rssfeeds” (plural)

Submit the form (leave the two last fields empty). Make sure you change the new field to “visible” and “Changeable”.

Now make sure the social tool is enabled. Return to the admin panel and go to the “Configuration settings” under the “Portal” section.

Click the “Tools” section and scroll right until the bottom of the page.

Enable the messaging and the social tools (you could enable just the social tool if you wanted but it is a whole lot more interesting with internal messaging).

Now save these settings changes and go to your profile page (using the profile tab)

Click the “Edit profile” link to edit your profile and enter your blog’s URL in the “RSS feeds” field.

Note that you can provide *more* than one feed if you want to: just separate them with the semi-column character (;), without spaces.

Now everything is configured, go to your “Shared profile” page. You will see that the feeds that you have added now appear at the bottom of the central column. There is currently a fixed limit at 5 posts per feed.

Development notes:

This integration was highly simplified by the Magpie RSS reader, a GPL library written in PHP that allows reading RSS and Atom formats and parsing the results into a simple PHP array.

There is an included caching mechanism (which stores cached pages into the archive/ directory) that refreshes pages only every 60 minutes (see rss_cache.inc).

Last week we started our first baby steps in mobile learning, thanks to our long preparations, an edition of PHPArchitect, and the efforts of one of Dokeos Latinoamérica’s employees (Christian), who wanted to try it out.

The very first result was something like this

Dokeos' users list appears on cell phone

Then I suugested he got a little deeper and got a list of courses-related events and we got this

Dokeos events on a cellphone

This feature, along with a whole range of additional features, will probably make it into the corporate version first, and then move to the free version, once the costs of development have been covered by corporate customers.

All in all, this is a very exciting feature to have and, although it doesn’t get into the classic expectations of an m-learning system, it certainly opens the door very wide for it. Now the next steps are to

• allow a student to send comments in the forum
• allow a student to take simple tests
• allow a student to reply to surveys
• allow teachers to check the reports of their students’ progress

These little features, that will get Dokeos right into the m-learning market, will all make it to the corporate version first, then be applied to the free version.

Compartimos con ustedes la grabación de lo que fue un enlace telefónico en Radio Capital con Yannick Warnier de Dokeos

Él comentó sobre el e-learning y el evento Dokuda.

E-learning es la tecnología que permite seguir cursos en línea.

El evento Dokuda se realizó el 25 y 26 de junio.

Fue un encuentro con y entre la gente que utilizaba el producto Dokeos y afines.

Dokeos es un programa que permite a un docente dictar cursos a sus estudiantes. Y que posibilita el seguimiento a los estudiantes por parte de docentes y padres.

El locutor resaltó la ventaja de tener a los desarrolladores en Perú, de contar con este soporte de primera calidad y de forma permanente.

Algunas empresas que confían en Dokeos son la Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola, la Universidad Norbert Wiener, radio Planeta, radio La Eñe, radio San Borja,

The LMS Evaluation Commitee of the University of North Carolina at Charlorte just published the results of a 5 quarters survey about the implementation of Moodle to replace their current BlackBoard Vista.

Although I don’t particularly like Moodle (mostly because our users find it much more complicated to use than Dokeos), there are two things that I really liked in the results from this report (and I’m sure there are loads of other interesting data in there if you keep your eyes opened):

• 80% of the 10 teachers having used BlackBoard Vista *and* Moodle fin Moodle more reliable and stable when accessing a course
• 100% find Moodle easy to use

And here I was, thinking that a huge company like BlackBoard would at least provide some value for their products by ensuring there was almost no bug… seems like I’ve been very wrong.

And to think about the fact that most people find Dokeos much easier to use than Moodle… BlackBoard Vista must be a big piece of ununderstandable software!

One more for the Blackboard Popularity Chronicles

I’m glad we’re on our way to cover 50% of the Dokeos code with unit tests by the end of July (thanks to BeezNest, Dokeos Latinoamérica and particularly Arthur and Ricardo here, who are having a lot of fun making this a reality).

Gracias a un proyecto en colaboración con el grupo Runasimipi, representado en esta ocasión por la Srta. Irma Alvarez Ccoscco (foto), ayudada por Amos Batto, Dokeos 1.8.6 está disponible en Quechua Cusqueño (para instalaciones funcionando en UTF-8).

Irma Alvarez traduzco Dokeos a Quechua

La traducción, aunque incompleta (80%) , marca un etapa importante en la integración de Dokeos en la enseñanza primaria y sus posibles colaboraciones con el proyecto One Laptop Per Child. Siendo un sistema para enseñanza, esperamos permitirá una mejor preservación del Quechua (Cusqueño, en este caso).

DOKUDA - Dokeos Users Days America

If you’re a fan of Dokeos and plan to head to South America during the next few days, then you definitely want to get to DOKUDA, the 25th and 26th of June 2009.

We’ve been preparing the event for about a month now, and should get about 500 different people every day, over a two-days period. All the conferences are in Spanish, so you’d better understand it a little bit, but we are really welcoming warmly any North American or Canadian wanting to pay a visit to this international event.

All the information is on the afore-mentioned website, really, but there are a few things I’d like to point out:

• the event will be free and non-for-profit (possible benefits will go into development of educational projects here in Peru)
• the event has been advertised in an incredible amount of external websites, thanks to an amount just as incredible of people just motivated by Dokeos
• the event is divided into two days of talks: one technical day and one business/institution day
• we’re going to have the honor of having two speakers from Spain (+ one in videoconference) and two speakers from Uruguay, who will join the fun and talk about their experiences with Dokeos and the future of e-learning in America (Central and South, mostly)
• a technological fair has been organized at the same time, so companies can show off their products
• we’re going to have talks about new Dokeos 1.8.6 features and the plans for the future
• we have invited national ministers to get to know how e-learning can help their institutions
• we have over 16 talks in total, with topics all centered on Dokeos
• some OLPC XO will be there, to show what can be done with Dokeos

In conclusion… this is going to be a GREAT event. Don’t miss it. Any doubt, just comment here or fill the contact form on the website!

I wrote an article on the blog of Dokeos Latinoamérica a few days ago about the new map for Dokeos campuses around the world. Well, here it is (this is generated from data from end of May 2009, so pretty recent at the time of writing)

World map of Dokeos Campuses - May 2009

The main changes are:

• a twofolds multiplication of the number of portals in most places
• a better coverage of Africa

With version 1.8.6, we should see the presence of Dokeos spread even more, as it is even easier to handle 1.8.6 than it is to handle 1.8.5 (and it is much more stable as well).

Today I went to the Escuelab in the centre of Lima to meet with Alberto, Kike Mayorga and Kiko Contreras.

My visit was apparently taken with great interest and they’ve video-interviewed me for some time to talk about DOKUDA and my projects with Dokeos and the OLPC. Apparently, the idea to have Dokeos run on one of the XO itself was never thought about, and that seemed to be an announcement of uttermost interest to them that this *could* be done at all. They suggested I try straight away (which I did) but my knowledge of Fedora was a bit limited at this point to know where exactly to download the packages. I did try some rpm -q and yum install commands, but without success (yum install apache seemed to trigger the download of something unrelated, I’ll have to investigate this further). Although this is unrelated, I saw that one could actually run Ubuntu on these (not that I have intentions of trying that shortly).

Apparently the problem that would be solved by the install of Dokeos on one of the XO is that when the government is sending XOs to remote areas, it also sends them with a PC pre-installed with Linux, which is supposed to serve as a server for the XO. However, people in remote areas cannot manage them, so someone around tells them “That thing is useless, just install Windows to be able to use it”, and they do. Of course, this is an illegal copy of Windows in most cases.

This brings two moral problems:

1. Children are curious. When they’ll want to know how the system works, Windows won’t give them the ability to analyse this.
2. Children want to share. How will the teacher deal with the student wanting to share some proprietary software which most certainly costs about one year of his parents’ revenue? Make him a software pirate at the age of 6 without letting him know about it?

Installing Dokeos on one of the XO’s (where Windows *cannot* be installed) ensures the system can remain there and is “transportable” (they can go on a walk and write about what they’re doing into Dokeos directly if the teacher goes with his XO as well). The only problem so far would be the disk space (and possibly the RAM, but Dokeos uses very little RAM per script loading).

Sebastian Silva apparently is also part of the “team” but is currently in Bolivia if I understood well.

One of the plans of the team is to setup a bus trip in remote areas equipped with the laptops in order to update the systems, reinstall the PCs under Linux and explain them how to use them. That sounds like a lot of fun. I’ll be tracking that project.

Escuelab already confirmed they *did* want to come and show their projects during the e-learning event at the end of June (DOKUDA)