Claroline

Good Features

  • Includes tutorials on how to use the tool's various features, for instructors and students.
  • The tool requires very little technical prowess and has an intuitive GUI, making it ideal for widespread deployment.
  • Creation of exercises is simple, customizable and straightforward. They can be configured for anonymous use, tracked use, use within a certain set of dates and times, unlimited use, or single-time use.
  • The exercise creator can set a maximum allowed number of exercise attempts and a maximum allowed time limit per attempt.
  • Exercise configuration and solution sets are very customizable. The creator can chose to put one question per page, or put all the questions on one page, and can chose if the user should be allowed to immediately see answers, or see answers after the maximum number of allowed attempts, or never see the answers at all.
  • Exercise questions can be created from scratch, or grabbed from other Claroline exercises. Questions can also be weighted, if the creator so desires, positively for right answers and negatively for wrong ones.
  • When a user picks an answer in an exercise, the creator can chose to include a comment section to go along with that answer, which could possibly direct the user back to clarifying materials.
  • Both the user and the creator can keep track of the user's score on each exercise.
  • Allows for learning paths, which are lists of suggested exercises and modules, to be created from imported content.

Bad Features

  • The content that has been entered into Claroline is separated into courses, which are on a white-list system of accessibility. This makes upkeep of correct distribution of hundreds of students in dozens of courses, all of which changes every 11-12 weeks, very difficult.

Missing Features

  • Most content must be created inside the Claroline environment. An HTML importer would be useful.
  • For the exercises, there are only five options for answers: True/False, Matching, Fill in the Blanks, Multiple Choice (unique answer), or Multiple choice (multiple answers). The ability to answer in compilable code would be desirable.