Interaction tools

The objective of the interaction section is to group tools which facilitate communication between learners as well as between learner and teacher. Unlike the Authoring tools which are primarily for teacher use, The Interaction tools are provided mainly for use by other users also, to support their learning.

Illustration 28: Interaction tools

Agenda

This tool provides users with a comprehensive diary/calendar tool to which they can add events etc.

Dropbox

Users can use the course dropbox to share their own documents with others on the course.

Groups

Use this to create groups within in the course and manage access to course tools.

Assignments

Create assignments for learners to complete within the Chamilo platform, or to complete externally and upload for evaluation by the teacher. The assignments tool integrates fully with the reporting and assessments tools and allows for quick and easy monitoring of assignment submissions and results.

Wiki

The Wiki provides a handy tool for collaboration between users, be they teachers or learners, through providing a clear and simple interface for the joint production of a class document.

Forum

The very fully featured forum tool allows for the creation and management of forums for use by course members, and includes the facility to quote student posts to teaching forums and edit, mark or annotate their work in whatever way the teacher judges will best support students' learning.

Users

This tool allows learners to view who else is subscribed to the course, and teachers to manage course users, subscribing teachers and users, and importing and exporting course lists as required. The users tool also integrates with the Groups tool.

Chat

Chamilo provides a simple text-chat facility allowing users to chat with other users on-line in the platform.

Surveys

The fully featured survey tool a powerful means of inviting users on the platform to quickly and easily offer comment and feedback for the evaluation and development of courses. The tool also supports the analysis of results collected from participants.

Notebook

Sometimes a learner or teacher just wants to keep personal notes relevant to his or coursework. The notebook tool provides a simple means for users to write and store and organize such notes within the platform for their own use, using the on-line editor. Notes created by this tool are private: no user has access to the notes of another user.

Video-conference

It is now relatively easy, using a local video-conference server, to install the video-conference tool within a Chamilo course, although it remains an external extension which is not always available in a classic portal. Chamilo 1.9 supports BigBlueButton 0.8, open-source conferencing software which supports recording of the white board and audio from a conference. The video sessions can later be made available within Chamilo itself as a video library inside the course. From a teacher's point of view, it's worth lobbying your administrator to set it up!