SiteGround Tutorials

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Claroline Tutorial

 

Claroline Installation

Get a Professional Affordable Claroline installation with SiteGround Claroline hosting Package!

The installation of Claroline includes uploading the installation package via cPanel's File Manager or using an FTP client. The latest release can be found at the Claroline's official website.

Bear in mind that the uploaded package should reside under the public_html directory, which is the web root folder for your account, or alternatively under a subdirectory of it.

Additionally, prior to performing the installation, a new database should be created. You can easily do this following the MySQL Tutorial.

How to install Claroline?

The next step is to access the directory where you have uploaded the Claroline installation package.

• In case you have uploaded it directly under the public_html folder it will be accessible directly via your domain name - http://yourdomainname.com.
• In case you have used a subdirectory, for example "claroline", it will be accessible via http://yourdomainname.com/claroline.

If everything is done right you should go to http://yourdomainname.com/claroline/install where you should see the following page:

Press the "Next" button to continue. The next step will lead you to a page where Claroline will check the server requirements.

The next thing to do is enter your MySQL details. Here, you have to enter the details of the MySQL username that you have already created. In the "Database mode" field make sure you have selected "single" mode.

When you press the "Next" button you will be taken to a new page where you should specify the name of your database.

Next, you have to enter the administrative login details for the application. Make sure you enter a valid e-mail address and that you remember the password for the administrative username.

Now you should check if the "Complete URL" filed shows the correct URL to your application - http://yourdomainname.com/claroline/ in our case. If you are installing Claroline into a subdomain, you should make sure you have this value set correctly. All other settings on this page should remain at their default values.

You have almost finished the installation now. There are two pages left to configure, however. First, youshould enter the name of your organization and the URL of its website if any.

Next you will see a page that summarizes the settings you have entered. You should carefully check them and press the "Install Claroline" button. If you have set everything correctly, you should be forwarded to a page that instructs you to delete the "install" directory from your script directory. Once you have done that, just press on the "Go to your newly created campus" button.

Congratulations! You are now ready to start building your online courses!

 

Create a course in Claroline

To create a new course with your Claroline application, you have to log in with your administrative details first.

Then you need to create a new category of courses. To do this, go to the Platform Administration menu and click the "Manage course categories" link.

Next, click on the "Create category" link in the top left part of the screen.

Here you should enter the name for your category. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will use "Sample category". Right after that you have to set a code for your category. You should save this code for future use.

When you are ready, just click on the "OK" button.

Now you should go to the "Platform Administration" menu and click on the "Create course" link.

Here you should insert the information for your course - its name, the correct category (Sample category in our case) and to specify the access level for this course.

You course should be created successfully! Now you should enter the appropriate content in it. To do this, go to Platform Administration and choose Course list. Next, click on the "Sample course" link under the "Course Title" column.

From this page you can modify your course. First, you should start with adding text on its main page. To do this, click on the "Add text" link.

Once you do this, you will be forwarded to a friendly WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) editor that will allow you to create an introduction page for your course. You will find it very intuitive and easy to use.

Your course is now ready! You can continue with adding documents, exercises and more information to it.

Create an Exercise in Claroline

To add a new exercise, first select your course and click on the Exercises link on the left part of your screen.

In this page, you will see the created exercises for your course. To add a new one, click on the "New exercise" link right above the table.

Now you have to enter all the information for the exercise - its title, start and end date, whether the answers should be shown or not, how many attempts your students can make, etc.

Once you have created the exercise, you have to add questions to it. Just click the "New question" link right above the table and you will be forwarded to the question creation page.

In this page you can create the question with all the relevant data for it. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will add a "True/False" type of question. There are, however, various options that you can choose from - Multiple choice (Unique answer), Multiple choice (Multiple answers), Fill in blanks, Matching or the one that we have just selected - True/False. Once you are ready, just click on the "OK" button at the bottom of your page.

You should now type the answers to your question. First, under the "Expected choice" select the correct answer to the question (in our case - False). Then add any text next to it if you wish to describe the answer. Next, set the points that your students will receive if they answer correctly. For wrong answers you can set negative values if you wish to apply point penalties. Once you are ready, click on the "OK" button at the end of the page.

Now go back to your course and select the Exercise category. Then click on the icon under Visibility in order to make the exercise active.

Congratulations! Your exercise is now ready. Your students can start answering the questions!

Send an announcement in Claroline

When you add new courses, exercises or documents, you can send an announcement to the e-mail addresses of your students. To do this, first select the appropriate course and click on the Announcements link from the left menu.

You can now select whether you want to send a new message to a selected student or to all users that are subscribed to the current course. If you want to send a message to selected students only, you should click on the "Messages to selected users" link.

In this page, you can select the users that you want to send the message to. Once ready, press the "Submit" button to send the message.

If you want to send an announcement to all of the students added to your course, you should click on the "Add announcement" link. In this page, you can attach resources (Documents, Exercises, etc) to the announcement. They will be added as links to the message that you are sending. In addition, you can set whether your students should receive an e-mail for the notification or not.

Once you are ready, click on the "OK" button at the bottom of the page and the announcement will be added.