I researched a bit about Learn Managment Systems (LMS) and came across a system named Ilias. This LMS is used by some institutions, e.g. the Fachhochule für Verwaltung Nordrhein-Westfalen (a university of applied science in North Rhine Westfalia). I currently got an user account at their LMS and could do some work in a user space. The LMS and their instance seemed to have a lot of features. The development of the Ilias LMS seemed to be very active. They publish regularly minor releases.
But I was also curious about the admin site of the Ilias LMS and thus I took the time to install an instance on my notebook. I used the current version 5.3.5 and copied all files to a webcontent directory of the Apache webserver. Once I pointed my browser to that directory I got a webpage with the check of the installation requirements. I installed the missing ones and set the necessary permissions. Then I followed the next steps of the Ilias installation. I got an issue with the database installation, because the setting for ‘max_allowed_packet’ didn’t suit the needs of Ilias. I fixed that on the command line of MariaDB. I logged into MariaDB with admin rights and typed on the command line: ‘SET Global max_allowed_packet = [new value];’. Then everything went fine and the database was created and populated.
Once I finished the further steps of the installation, I got an adminstrator account. I could log into this account with the standard password and replace this with my own one. I created a new user and configured its settings, e.g. the language setting. I took a short look at the available tools of the LMS, especially those for the learn managment. Ilias came with an impressive set of such tools by default. I’ll examine this tools and will look for additional plugins next time.