Authoring content in Chamilo

A major advantage of Chamilo over other Learning Management Systems is that it provides a wide range of inbuilt features supporting the effective authoring of course content. The toolbar at the top of the documents page displays a range of tools to support authoring:

Illustration 36: Documents - toolbar

The icons marked with an a yellow asterisk represent creation tools. First and foremost, the teacher can create new rich media documents directly via the documents tool, without any need for an external authoring system. Just click the create rich media page/activity icon within the desired folder. A fully featured on-line editor appears.

Illustration 37: Documents – Creating a new document

After naming the document, it is possible to use all the options in the embedded rich text editor to format them. The editor supports a wide range of elements, including tables,images, audio, video, flash, etc. It includes an html editor which means that, for those with some knowledge of scripting the sky's the limit in terms of rich content!)

You can also use a series of document templates, (available in the left column), or create and save your own templates for designing further pages.

Once the document has been created/edited, save it by clicking on the Create document button.

Other types of documents can be created depending on your browser and the portal configuration (ask your administrator to enable these extra features if you don't see them in the toolbar).

Icon	Feature
	The draw feature allows you to draw diagrams or schema in a vector format9, which can be re-edited or exported to the bitmap format.
	The photo retouching feature is very similar to the Photoshop® tool and allows for the editing, cutting, colouring etc. of pictures or other bitmap images.
	The audio recording feature the recording of audio tracks right from your browser, using your microphone (on a laptop, the microphone is generally embedded). Flash® or Java® applet browser support is required for this one.
	The text-based voice generation feature allows you to have the computer speak for you. Try it. You'll be surprised by the quality of the generated voices.
	The web-cam clip feature allows you to record footage directly from your laptop's web-cam Flash® is required for this one.

9. In all recent browsers except Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, where this feature is not implemented. ↩