ANGEL Community Hub

Oh boy, you're probably thinking, another exciting update post. But wait! This one includes something that I think will make a lot of instructors very happy. We've introduced a feature that will make downloading drop box submissions more efficient and allow you to more easily identify who submitted what. Click Read More for information about the new tool.

We also made some changes to CSCS. When submitting a proposal, CSCS records who submitted it AND who the faculty member the submission was made on behalf of. The submitter information is now shown on the first page when creating a proposal, and will be filled in automatically with data from LDAP. People reviewing a proposal are now asked to provide their title, department, and campus. This information will also be filled in automatically with data from LDAP.

New Download Submissions tool

Up until now, the only way to download drop box submissions en masse was to use the associated file manager. The result is a zip archive which contains a series of folders, each of which had a 32-character alphanumeric name. This name uniquely identifies that student's submission in ANGEL's database, but doesn't help a human identify it.

As of this morning, a new tool titled Download Submissions is available in the utilities menu of each drop box. You can use this tool to download a zip file that, when expanded, contains folders that are named "Student name - date." If there are multiple submissions from a student in a day, these folders will be numbered in the order submitted. Inside each folder are the files that the student uploaded and an _about.htm file which contains the text that the student typed into the message box. With this naming scheme, you can identify who submitted files even if your students neglect to include any identifying information in the file name or the file itself.

Two additional files help you to identify which drop box the zip file is associated with (_title.htm) and shows you each submission's date, time, and title (_list.htm).

There are a few issues that we need to work out with ANGEL Learning. First, the zip archive doesn't have a .zip extension automatically added to it. Some browsers, such as Internet Explorer 7 and Safari 2 & 3, will automatically add the extension for you. Others, such as Firefox, do not. You may need to rename the file once you download it so that it will be automatically recognized as a zip file by Windows or MacOS X. Second, there are links to the files in _list.htm that contain backslashes (\). These links will work on Windows, but not on MacOS X. Third, you may see a warning about scripts when using Internet Explorer if you open _list.htm. You can ignore this warning. Finally, we'd like it if the archive had the same name as the drop box. All of these things will, hopefully, come in a future update. We've received a lot of valuable feedback from the ANGEL community on this topic and decided to go ahead with making the tool available despite these small flaws.