ANGEL Community Hub

ANGELshorts Vol. 2, Issue #6 Five Things Instructors Should Know about Downloading All Drop Box Submissions is now available.

From the article:
"Drop boxes provide an area for students to submit assignments electronically. You can then review and grade these assignments either by viewing them in your Web browser or downloading them to your desktop. However, did you know that as an alternative to downloading each drop box submission separately, you could download all drop box submissions simultaneously?"

The ANGEL Quizzing Team, comprised of instructors and instructional support staff from around Penn State, is focused on exploring new and powerful ways to use ANGEL Quizzes. In particular, the team identified several potential areas of growth regarding the use of ANGEL quizzes. These areas include the opportunity for instructors to (1) increase the use of question banks and question pools, e,g, materials from publishers, (2) incorporate third party applications such as Captivate and Softchalk, and (3) embed multimedia files (images, sounds and movie clips) into quiz questions.

Faculty who want to start using Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL, but are not sure where to start can attend a free workshop entitled “ANGEL: Start Using ANGEL in Your Course Right Away." This will be offered:

• Wednesday, Sept. 3, 8:30-10:30 a.m., 116 Wagner Building, University Park
• Wednesday, Sept. 3, 1:45-4:00 p.m., via an online Adobe Connect videoconference

An “ANGEL: Course Gradebook” workshop will also be offered, as follows:

• Thursday, Sept. 4, 1:00-3:00 p.m., 116 Wagner Building, University Park
• Friday, Sept. 5, 1:45-4:00 p.m., via Adobe Connect

For more information and to register beginning Aug. 25 at 9:00 a.m., visit http://its.psu.edu/training/.

As mentioned in the previous post, updates have been made to the Course Submission & Consultation System component. As a result, I have posted a revised User's Manual, accessed by opening the CSCS component, then selecting the User's Manual link in the toolbar. It is available in both HTML and PDF format.

A minor update was applied to ANGEL this morning during the maintenance window. The top banner now includes an “Accessible View” link to switch to text-only display. The new link is easy to locate for persons who use a screen reader. The accessible and mobile views can also be accessed using the 508 and PDA links in the lower left corner. In addition, the former "LIAS" link has been renamed "Library."

Changes were also made to CSCS. Please click the Read More link below for a list of these changes. If you have any questions or concerns about this morning's update, please contact ANGEL Support.

Information Technology Services (ITS) has canceled the ANGEL upgrade to version 7.2 originally scheduled for the weekend of July 19. Testing and analysis of 7.2 indicated that the new version (and some features) may not perform robustly in our environment, and for this reason we will remain at 7.1 for the next year. During this time frame, ITS staff will work closely with the ANGEL vendor to optimize a future release to meet the needs of the growing Penn State user environment. ITS will provide periodic updates to the user community throughout the coming year.