Dokeos 1.8.6 stable has now been released. You can download it here.
Dokeos 1.8.6 is the last stable version of Dokeos. It was finally released just before midnight, June 1st, East Pacific time.
This (minor) version of Dokeos focuses on exercises, with improvements in terms of shuffling of questions or answers inside a question, limiting the number of attempts, allowing for exams to be “continued” in more than one access, and deleting student results (for the admin or the coach). The planned time restrictions (relative) will not be included (interested customers did not get involved financially on this part just yet) but we have included auto-save of answers and absolute time limits (cannot start an exam after June 1st. It is hoped, however, that there will be involvement before 1.8.7. There will also be some effort on improving the hot-spot test type to enable zones delineation and simplify the interface.
Other improvements include:
- fixes to minor usability issues we found in Dokeos 1.8.5,
- improvements to the new profiling tool (extra user fields), which turned out to be far more powerful, potentially, than we had initially thought,
- improvements to the gradebook tool (now available at course level)
- a new version of the online editor (including many new features like GoogleMaps, ImageMaps and YouTube streams insertion)
- free positionning option of fill-in-the-blanks answers
- access to sessions by coach before and after the normal time limits of the session
- possibility for coaches to register external users directly to their session
- better isolation of sessions in interaction tools
- new audio-recorder in learning path (you can now send an mp3)
- new glossary tool
- new wiki tool
- optimisation of language-related functions (overall speed improved)
- assignments tool: now a directory can be configured as a task and be given limit submission dates
- allowing ZIP export of assignments for teachers
- attachments to agenda events
- chat tool now can open in a new window and is independent from the active course
- re-worked option to hide/show e-mail address
- added introduction section to group areas
- new personal notebook tool (in-course)
- ability to take surveys in more than one shot
- new social tool (disabled by default to prevent privacy problems)
- a few generated charts to help statistics analysis
- about 100 security improvements
Most of these developments have been financed by new Dokeos corporate clients, now considering Dokeos as a serious corporate e-learning platform. The rest has been developed by the latin-american team as an effort joining the Dokeos team, or by our new three community developers: jand, ivantcholakov and herodoto. We have had some contributions coming from Italia as well, like a quick Windows demo installer and a plugin for Joomla and JFusion.
A new page will appear soon regarding the development of Dokeos 1.8.7 and a special corporate version of Dokeos we are preparing.
If you want to know about Dokeos 1.8.5, click here.
July, 17 2008 at 11:45 pm |
[...] Dokeos 1.8.6 [...]
December, 9 2008 at 9:25 am |
We have an 1.8.6 Beta version?
December, 9 2008 at 3:29 pm |
Not yet. We hope we’ll be able to release the beta 1 on the 15th of December
January, 5 2009 at 9:49 am |
Could you please suggest the best resource to follow Dokeos development. Some bugtracker or wiki. Or furum? Where the action is going on?
January, 5 2009 at 12:08 pm |
The cycle is:
- dev news here (on my blog, I think there’s no other more accurate or up-to-date resource)
- bugs consultation: forum (http://www.dokeos.com/forum/) to get your bug listed and see if someone has the same problem (you touch a wider but lower-technical-level user base there)
- http://projects.dokeos.com is *the* resource of choice in terms of development activity. Create an account there and watch the bugs by querying, in the advanced search mode, bugs “Due in version 1.8.6″ (http://projects.dokeos.com/?do=index&project=1&due0=44&status0=open)
Note that most of the tasks for 1.8.6 are already almost done. Most of them need testing to get approved. Some others need a little refactoring before being submitted.
We have recently approved 3 new official developers from the community and are happy with the experience, so if you feel motivated, don’t hesitate to send a few patches and comments, and you might well be considered for insertion after a while.
March, 21 2009 at 1:01 pm |
Yes!!
1.8.6 works fine here. It´s running at home in a test enviroment and at school, also testing but i´m going to upgrade later…for shure!
April, 16 2009 at 6:50 am |
“The new plan for the stable release is now for mid-March 2009.”
dokeos 1.8.6 stable release can be download now?
April, 16 2009 at 10:22 am |
Nope, still late on schedule. We are currently reviewing a bug fix. We will release RC1 as soon as it’s fixed (probably today). There will then be ten days before we release the stable.
April, 25 2009 at 2:46 am
I am assuming we are still behind on the schedule. When is the next expected date?
April, 17 2009 at 12:26 am |
Thanks.very Exciting.but I found In 1.8.6 beta3,learning path hava some charactor bug even I change “Character set” to gb2312(my country charator).But,not hapended in 1.8.5 stable.
May, 25 2009 at 11:45 am |
I am so excited! Dokeos 1.8.6 will be here a few days after Duke Nukem Forever, so we’ll get a great game and a great LMS. Soon.
July, 28 2009 at 3:06 pm |
Fishing for an answer. In addition…thanks a ton to your team for the work. You guys are doing a great job. I’m actually working on a DimDim integration and will make my code available when it’s ready. Hoping my company can become more involved in development efforts moving forward.
Question: One problem with the “Learning Paths” / “Courses” is the inability to link to pretty much any object in the LMS. (looks like 2.0 addresses this?) Specifically, I’m trying to tie a survey directly to a Course. The workaround I had for 1.8.5 was to make use of the Link tool…this seems to break in 1.8.6. After digging around, it looks like the XSS security code and URLencoding stuff is converting the & characters to & and not converting them back when actually posting the URL.
Is there any way around this?
Thanks ahead of time,
Mike
July, 28 2009 at 5:17 pm |
Hi Mikel,
We are ourselves working on a DimDim integration. You can try it on http://dimdimdev.dokeos.com/ and I can send you a link to the versioning system where you can download the source (we have no packaging just yet). We would be glad to work with you on that, in order to spare efforts.
We removed the possibility to link to other resources than documents/exercises/forum/tasks because we were not able to maintain these with a reasonable level of stability. How is the escaping of & characters generating a problem? Do you have an example?
August, 15 2009 at 6:50 am
Hi ywarnier.
I’ve tried to test dimdim and dokeos integration in dimdimdev.dokeos.com, but I can’t because I see no participants in a course -I’m inscribed- to test it.
Now I see “#” title=”Dimdim#” class=”tool-icon” /> Dimdim#”, and no working dimdim module.
It’s possible to test it? It’s stable? Have been your “& characters” problem solved?
Thanks in advance.
August, 13 2009 at 1:35 pm |
Yannick,
It looks like the “free” version of Dokeos 1.86 has had several features removed that were available in 1.85. They are available in the Pro and Medical versions. Is this true?
August, 14 2009 at 4:00 pm |
Hi rparlett,
Not that I know of. Could you please give examples? I think there is a general belief that we are trying to “steal” stuff from the community and this is *absolutely* untrue, so please avoid spreading these false ideas by being unprecise. If you have a specific example, please bring it up, but “several features” is, in any case, untrue.
Regards.
August, 17 2009 at 6:29 am
I’m not trying to spread FUD, sorry.
http://dokeos.com/en/buy.php
There is a matrix which shows the differences between free, pro, and medical. 1.85 free had Oogie/Woogie, which if I’m not mistaken, falls under the Office-c category. Also, 1.85 free had virtual classroom / virtual meeting, which falls under the live category. Also, LDAP integration with AD was also an option in 1.85 free, but that appears to fall under the Office-c category as well.
August, 17 2009 at 5:39 pm |
Hi rparlett,
The “options” in 1.8.5 were “options” that had to be installed or configured separately (they were never “included” in Dokeos 1.8.5 from the start).
These options (oogie/woogie, virtual classroom / virtual meeting and LDAP) are still possible to enable in Dokeos 1.8.6 free. The only difference is that we consider their activation as a service (which we didn’t do in 1.8.5). As such, the 1.8.6 pro should be considered as a “free” + services.
Let’s call the matrix in buy.php a “marketing rephrasing”, or maybe the fact that it was mentioned in 1.8.5 an “over-estimation of common webmasters’ skills”.
We are always trying to provide the best services and software. There is, however, a fair amount of unfairness in what responsibilities the community considers a commercial company developing free software should have. This unfairness is often bound to a lack of investigation or understanding of the open-source model (provide free software, not free service).
We welcome the community to spread the word that everything is still in Dokeos 1.8.6 free, but we have our own marketing strategies that are aimed at providing services to people that have difficulties managing the administration of this type of software. Tech-savvy people are always free to download, analyse and enable the features they want (that have always needed to be enabled manually).
Sorry for the understandable confusion.
Regards.
April, 26 2009 at 9:23 am |
You are assuming well, but we have released RC1 already (on the 21st). You can download it here: http://www.dokeos.com/download/dokeos-1.8.6-rc1.zip. We are preparing RC2 for the next week. We will probably be done with the stable around the end of next week (hopefully). People have been adding bug reports like crazy (which is good as they are all tiny bugs) which generates a lot of additional work.