ANGEL Community Hub

There are a number of ways an instructor can customize a course. You can change the course theme (color scheme), select which components to display on the Resources and Communicate tabs, change which tab displays first (the default is Lessons), specify a Web page to display when a tab is selected (for example, a page you have created in your personal Web space), hide a tab that will not be used, and more. Version 7.1 offers some new themes for specific fields of study: anatomy and physiology, art, biology, chemistry, composition, criminal justice, health, history, math, molecules, money, music, pharmacology, physics, Spanish, and technology. A few examples of components you can add to the Resources tab are Grades, Attendance, Calculator, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

Please share with the community some ways in which you customize your courses, and your reasoning behind customizing various aspects.

Our ANGEL support team posts a good deal of information here to keep the community updated. However, we most of all wish to encourage *dialogue*...sharing of insights, best practices, what works (or not), solutions to challenges, from our “human knowledge base,” the people who actually use ANGEL.

You may ask, well, who are these ANGEL team people, anyway? Allow me to introduce myself.

We will probably send out an official announcement about this at some point, but I thought I'd let you know that we have two ANGEL Town Halls scheduled. One is Aug. 27 at 9:30 a.m. and the other Sept. 11 at 1:00 p.m., both in 141 Computer Bldg., UP, or via Adobe Connect.

Register today!

In case a "town hall" is new to you, it allows faculty, support staff and others who work with ANGEL a chance to view the new ANGEL 7.1 interface. It's an open discussion facilitated by ANGEL support staff within ITS, where in-depth exploration of all the new tools and features takes place, with time available at the end for questions and answers.

I have just posted updated documentation for the CSCS within ANGEL. This can be accessed from within the CSCS by selecting the User's Manual link in the toolbar (not by clicking the question mark icon at the left of the ANGEL screen).

As of yesterday, two fixes have been made regarding groups:

* The PIN Enrollment Settings link now appears on the group editor's Manage tab within the PSU Group Settings component.
* When you search for a group in order to self-enroll, the Enroll by PIN or Enroll (no PIN required) link is now available.

I have now felt comfortable to add the Enroll in a Group topic to the Help & Information Guide, knowing it is now accurate!

Seats are still open for the ITS Training Services face-to-face seminar "New Features in Version 7.1" on 6-13. I see in the registration area at http://its.psu.edu/training/ that you can register to "attend" from a distance via Adobe Connect.

Here is a link to the seminar handout: https://its.psu.edu/training/handouts/angel/71_NewFeatures.pdf

It is largely based on topics within the Help & Information Guide, but brings them together in a handy fashion. Faculty, ANGEL trainers, instructional designers, etc. may find this helpful.

As a perfectionist, for better or worse, normally, I'm a "you can't see it till it's finished" type-person. Our dedicated team of eight is building a new, improved ANGEL Help & Information Guide for v. 7.1, which is a searchable, browsable knowledgebase (content management system) in which we are placing relatively short, discrete topics. We really hope this will assist ANGEL users. In this case, I *want* you to see it before it's finished...read on.