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Ilios is a curriculum management platform for the Health Professions educational community. It is a robust web application used to collect, manage, and deliver curricular information. |
Welcome to the official Ilios User Guide. Feel free to bookmark this page and refer to it with any Ilios questions you may have. You can send any email inquiries here.
For an introduction to Ilios and to sign up for newsletters and announcements, click here. Once on that page, click "Status Reports" and then "join our mailing list". A form will appear requiring that you enter your email address and first and last name. A confirmation email message will be sent to the email address entered. This is required to confirm your subscription. We highly recommend subscribing to get the latest news. Subscription options are shown below.
To perform a quick search to find any Ilios topic you may be hoping to find, the search box in the upper right portion of the screen can be used for this. Before entering criteria, it appears as shown below. The search process used in searching the User Guide is similar to the Global Search functionality in Ilios. The starting point is shown below.
In the example shown above, the search term entered is "Add Session". You can see that many results were returned from that search. "Add New Session" is the first of the results returned. The others can located by scrolling down the page. The highest likelihood (best match) appears towards the top of the screen decreasing further down the page.
As the search criteria is further refined, the results returned will be fewer. The more specific the search criteria is, the fewer results you will have to scroll through to find what you want. They are sorted by best match. Click on any of the links to pull up the exact topic in detail.
Please contact us at [email protected] with any comments or suggestions you may have regarding this User Guide or about Ilios functionality in general.
The user guide is configured to have high level chapters based on the flyout menu items in the application, to be followed by a quick guide explaining how to perform common tasks in Ilios.
All pages within the guide that have bookmarks added by the author will have clickable links in an area on the right side of the screen called "ON THIS PAGE". An example of this is shown below.
Breadcrumbs are available in the User Guide just as they are in many locations within the Ilios application itself. If you are on the parent or root level of a page, they won't appear since there are no breadcrumbs to follow. In the following screenshot, I have navigated to the "Course Rollover" section of the guide, which is a sub page or chapter inside the "Courses" section, which in turn is a subsidiary of "Courses and Sessions".
Breadcrumbs explained ...
- COURSE ACTIONS: navigates up one level to "Course Actions" page
- COURSES: navigates up two levels to "Courses" page
- COURSES AND SESSIONS: navigates up three levels back to the root of "Courses and Sessions"
These breadcrumbs it should be noted only appear at the top of a page that is a subsidiary page of higher level pages or chapters.
One important thing to remember: Ilios is a web application.
This application is web-based, meaning it must be accessed through web-browsing interfaces. While it may be used on any current web browser including Microsoft's Edge, Ilios is optimized for use with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser 32 and above, as well as all webkit-based web browsers such as Google Chrome (ver. 30.x and above) Safari (for Mac), or Opera (ver. 10.x and above).
Stick with the most recent releases in any of the browsers listed above, and Ilios will perform as expected. It can also be used on mobile phone browsers and most tablets.
Work processed in Ilios is presented and collected in real-time, but is only saved to the system when a save event occurs. Much of the saving activity takes place automatically in real-time using in line editing or other user-friendly editing areas. This guide describes in detail how the save process occurs (ie. when you will need to manually save and when it takes place automatically). When there is work that is unsaved, action buttons will become active and should be used to process the save event before navigating away.
Ilios is designed to provide as much information as possible in a single display page. Ilios screens (Courses, Sessions etc.) allow for real-time text searching on multiple fields to make it easy to find the information you need.
Your primary view is that of an editor and content creator. In order to facilitate this complex view, the system currently works best on a high-resolution display monitor. Other views such as Learner views, and other non-content creation views, are usable at lower resolution, and can be viewed on smart phones and other handheld devices.
Ilios is built explicitly on the concept of user-centric information, rather than course-centric information. What this means is that the default view for a user entering the system is not an individual course, but the aggregate of all courses with which they are associated. As a course developer/ director, the maintenance of a single course and its sessions and offerings can easily be performed by selecting “Courses and Sessions” from the Ilios Menu.
The Ilios workflow is based on a curriculum structure which incorporates several interconnected levels (displayed below starting with a school's highest level -- program):
- A deployment of Ilios may include multiple related schools or institutions.
- Every school or institution creates and owns specific programs of study.
- Each program is divided into specific academic years.
- Each course managed is associated with a specific program or programs, via those years.
- Each course is made up of a number of sessions, or units.
- Each session or unit is "offered" at a specific time and location, or given a specific due date. These "offerings" are expressed as events on the calendar display, which provides access to detail information for users of the system.
- When working in Ilios, each of the levels maintains its state and changes do not cascade up or down. This is so work can be done on each level independently and is a result of our wanting to provide as much information as possible on one screen.
Ilios allows for either native or enterprise authentication. Whether your institution uses Shibboleth authentication, basic LDAP, or CAS, Ilios provides configuration for this. If not, you may either modify the configuration of the authentication files to meet the needs of your system, or implement the native Ilios username/password authentication system.