ANGEL Community Hub

An update to ANGEL was applied January 23 during the maintenance window. This update contains bug fixes for ANGEL, bug fixes and enhancements for CSCS, and a major change to the way that the contact ANGEL Support link will work for World Campus courses and users.

Changes to ANGEL Support contact form

Support for Outreach Services/World Campus-affiliated courses, groups, LORs, and students is provided by the Outreach Services help desk instead of ANGEL Support. Please note that Outreach Services provides technical support for their students in all areas, not just ANGEL.

Currently, the support contact form, accessed through the "contact ANGEL Support" link in the footer of most pages in ANGEL, sends support requests to ANGEL Support, which then redirects help requests to Outreach as needed. The upcoming update will contain an enhancement to direct users directly to Outreach technical support instead of ANGEL Support if it can be determined that their help request should be handled by Outreach. This will help Outreach ANGEL users reach the appropriate support unit faster.

The new behavior when clicking the contact ANGEL support link in the footer of ANGEL pages is as follows:

• Anyone clicking the support link from within a course that has its campus code set to World Campus will be redirected to the World Campus technical support page.
• Anyone who has their organization set to World Campus and clicks the support link from a location outside of a course (e.g. the profile page) will be directed to the World Campus technical support page.

In all other cases (including users who have not logged in to ANGEL), users will be directed to the ANGEL support form. The ANGEL Support unit will continue to forward messages to Outreach for assistance as needed.

Please note that it is not possible to redirect users with 100% accuracy. Manually-created courses, blended merge courses, groups, and LORs may not have their campus affiliation set correctly. The enhancement will streamline the support path for Outreach users in most cases.

Additional information on the ANGEL bug fixes and CSCS changes are available by clicking the read more link below.

Folks,

Is anyone else as uncomfortable with the overemphasis on timed everything as I am? Obviously, insufficient time results in lower levels of performance but what is less apparent is that just the perception of insufficient time results in reduced performance. Very dangerous.

I am concerned, too, about all the emphasis on assessment. One would think to read about it that there is a shortage of assessment tools. I would like to see some PL authoring tools made available and get the emphasis rebalanced and moved back towards learning.

was5088

ANGELshorts Vol. 3, Issue #5 Five Things You Should Know about the Assessment Tool is now available.

From the article:
"Beginning January 5, 2010, course editors will have the option of using the assessment tool along with the quiz tool in their ANGEL course. Assessments, like quizzes, can be used for student practice and feedback, homework assignments, and to evaluating learning. Assessments will replace quizzes when ANGEL is upgraded to version 7.4 following the end of the spring 2010
semester. Course editors are encouraged to prepare for the change by experimenting with the assessment tool during the semester. Documentation and video tutorials are available to assist with the transition. Additionally, a free Winter-Fest workshop on the assessment tool will be held January 7. To register, visit the ITS Training Services site at http://its.psu.edu/training/.

Go to the ANGELshorts tab to read previous issues.

In a previous discussion on the ANGEL Community Hub, it was mentioned that there was a bug in ANGEL causing the ANGEL banner and navigation to display on Link content type items even when that option was disabled in the settings. I have done some tooling around and discovered that the "No Banner" option seems to be behaving properly now, and indeed banners and navigation are turned off completely. Can someone verify that this has been fixed? If there was an announcement, I must have missed it.

Thanks in advance,
Natalie

To optimize the performance of Penn State's Course Management System, ANGEL, during fall finals week, the Import Wizard and Export Wizard tools will be turned off from 4:00 a.m. Saturday, December 12 until 6:00 a.m. Saturday, December 19. These tools include the Copy Course, import Content Package, import Master Course, and export ANGEL Archive functions. Note: During finals week, instructors can continue to create course content and create master courses and learning object repositories. Students can continue to upload/download files and access lesson content.

I am working with an instructor on a course that uses 90 min, timed quizzes. The quizzes are available during a short, 30 min window of opportunity. Some of the settings for the quiz are:
• disabled time warning under "Time settings"
• "Automatically submit when time limit expires" is selected
• Max attempts = 1
• "Warn about incomplete items" is selected
• auto save is disabled
• "Do not allow users to save and finish later" is selected
• Full Review is selected

The problem we're having is, say a student logs on 1 minute before the quiz closes and they complete the quiz before the 90 min and submit it, ANGEL shows the results as expected...

For a long time, I have always believed that if a number of assignments are lumped under one category, and if there are more than one category in the gradebook, those assignments must bear equal number of max points or the calculation would not be correct. It seems that there are exceptions.

Exception 1: there is only one category called "course grade" and the gradebook is in "point" mode.
Exception 2: there are more than one category, and the gradebook can be of "point" or "percentage" mode, but the weight of each category are numbers in terms of points, such as "auto-calculate." That is the last line on the Category screen shows the total points of the course (such as 600) and 100%.

Any others?