Chamilo Studio

Chamilo Studio is an authoring tool that lives inside the Chamilo LMS. Its own tagline is "Integrated Authoring Tools for LMS," and the home page pitches it as "A better way to create eLearning course and games," with the promise "Get your course live today." It is for teachers, trainers and course administrators who already run a Chamilo platform and want to build interactive pages without writing code or sending files back and forth between an authoring program and the LMS. Courses are built on the platform itself and published there, and when a course has to go somewhere else, it can be exported as a SCORM package.

The quick start guide frames the product plainly: "Chamilo Studio is a complete page builder." Once logged in, an author has one interface for editing all pages, with access to plugins, the theme and settings, and can go straight from editing to the live page. The guide compares the experience to working in a design tool.

Building a page

Work starts on a blank page with a sidebar of elements. The author drags an element out of the sidebar onto the page and edits it in place. The guide walks through a first page step by step, and that walkthrough shows most of what the builder does:

• Video. Drag a video onto the canvas, then paste a YouTube link or choose a file.
• Titles and text. Click to type a title in place. The Text Editor widget is a WYSIWYG editor that "behaves just like the classic visual editor," taking rich text, links and images.
• Layout. Drag in one column or two columns to structure the page, for example text in the first column and an image in the second.
• Buttons. A button element creates navigation. Its behavior is set to Next Page, Previous page or Custom Behavior, the last configured with a no-code editor.
• Preview. At any moment the Play button shows the content as a learner will see it.

The home page lists the same building blocks from the other direction: texts, quizzes, images, audio and video under "Interactive content." It also describes the editor as a "No code engine" for building without programming skills and without IT, using a visual drag-and-drop editor.

Exercises and interactions

Three interactive elements are documented, each edited the same way: drag it onto the page, click edit, fill it in, save.

The quiz element takes a question and its possible answers, and the author marks the correct one. Because it sits on the page like any other element, a check of understanding can follow directly after the video or text it refers to.

The "Drag the Words" element builds text-based challenges in which learners drag words into blanks in sentences. The guide calls it "Excellent for language training, among other things." Authors type the title and the sentence and surround each missing expression with stars; the starred words become the blanks.

The Dialog element adds speech bubbles. "Just like comics," the guide says, characters in eLearning speak through text in bubbles. The author picks a character and enters the line, which can include links or images. This suits scenario pages, where a customer, a colleague or a tutor speaks to the learner.

An iframe element embeds another document into the page. The author enters a link and can set the height of the frame, which brings an outside resource into the lesson without sending learners away from it.

Templates and design

Authors do not have to start from blank pages. The home page offers "featured course templates," says authors can also create their own, and calls the templates "fully-customizable." Branding is in reach of non-designers: "Why not change colors and add your company logo? Now you can!" The home page also promises responsive design, with the same content accessible across multiple devices in an appropriate format, and mentions apps and games among the things the visual editor can build.

Publishing inside Chamilo and exporting as SCORM

Publishing is the part that sets Chamilo Studio apart from a standalone authoring tool. Content is built on the Chamilo platform, so, in the guide's words, "Your content is directly published online. You don't need extra steps like export/import." The home page sells the same point under "Streamline processes," promising to cut out multiple manual internal steps because content is published directly on Chamilo.

For other platforms there is an export. The guide says a project can be exported to a SCORM package "in order to publish it to another platform like Moodle, Claroline or other LMS." It then shows the Moodle side: log into an administrator or teacher profile, open the course page, select "Add a SCORM package," drag the package into the right week of the course, and click Upload. A course built for a Chamilo platform can therefore also run in an LMS that accepts SCORM packages.

Tracking with xAPI

The documentation has a section on xAPI, which it describes as an eLearning specification for collecting data about the range of experiences a person has in online and offline training, with a shared format for sending and receiving data that makes it "an ideal tool for sharing learning between multiple systems." The examples show the statements Chamilo Studio content produces. They use four verbs: interacted, answered, completed and attempted. Each is shown against two kinds of activity, launching a course and visiting a page, with identifiers for the course and the page. For a training team, this means learner activity in Studio pages is recorded at the level of individual pages, not only at course completion.

Support and company

Besides the product, the company offers services and shows a portfolio of work, and enquiries go through a contact page. The documentation links further guides to Chamilo itself: a Chamilo wiki page and guides in French and Spanish. The site publishes no prices.

Who it suits and who it does not

Chamilo Studio suits schools, training departments and teachers already on Chamilo LMS who want interactive lessons built where they are delivered: video pages with embedded quizzes, gap-fill exercises for language classes, dialog-driven scenarios, all published without an export step and tracked with xAPI. The templates, color and logo settings and no-code buttons put it within reach of instructors who have never used an authoring tool. The SCORM export means a course is not locked to one platform, and the Moodle import steps are documented.

It is a narrower fit for an organization that does not run Chamilo, since direct publishing is its main advantage, and for teams that need a wide range of question types: the documentation covers quizzes, Drag the Words, dialogs and embeds.