ANGEL Community Hub

Reading others' posts in this hub is helpful; clearly, other users are more advanced technically than I am. But the detail-oriented nature of these posts obscures the fact that ANGEL could be far more transparent to students than it is. The vast majority of my emails to students deal with how to navigate ANGEL. I'm not interested in having my students become more proficient at yet another short-lifetime software package; I want them to be able to `look through' ANGEL to see the course content, and have ANGEL work to enrich their learning, not of ANGEL, but of the subject. Engineering of advanced features is great -- but why not a faculty board to address more fundamental issues? An example of these is the overuse of acronyms instead of plain language. There are others.

Am I blanking? I just can't think how you could add an extra credit question into an ANGEL assessment - not in the gradebook - A faculty member wants to have an extra-credit question at the end of the quiz.... is there a way to get it to calculate automatically as extra credit?

Last May I did a number of short screen-capture movies illustrating what I believe are design flaws in ANGEL that could be, and should be, easily corrected. I tried to post one of these videos here in the ANGEL Community Hub, but discovered that videos are not allowed.

So, I am going to post a simple static screen shot showing how the Unread Message window is too small to be useful. As you will see in the screen shot, I have five unread messages. Yet only one of the headers can be seen at one time. I feel like I am in a line-oriented program from the 1970s. The ANGEL designers' fascination with placing windows within windows and making them so small that you are constantly scrolling to find anything is something I just cannot get my head around.

For quizzes and surveys that were created in version 7.3, then converted to 7.4 assessments and surveys, a faulty “User Tracking/Anonymous Mode Conflict” pop-up box displays when the “settings” link is selected. The pop-up box indicates that there is an incompatibility in the “User Tracking” and “Anonymous” settings, even if there is no incompatibility. The pop-up asks the instructor to select whether to make submissions anonymous. If the assessment or survey will be graded, do not keep the default setting, which is “Make submissions anonymous,” in which case no student user IDs will be associated with submissions. Instead, make sure to select the second option to “Set User Tracking to Everyone and uncheck Make submissions anonymous.” Information Technology Services is working with the vendor on a solution to cause this pop-up box only to appear if there is in fact an incompatibility in the settings.

Does anyone know... is it possible to create internal links to assessments in ANGEL so that they could be put in a central location - like the custom content pod on the resources page- (similar to the way discussion forums appear?
Thanks

On May 15, Information Technology Services (ITS) upgraded Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL, from version 7.3 to 7.4. The new version features enhancements to several existing tools, and several new tools including a grading rubric tool help course editors perform administrative tasks. In version 7.4, the quiz tool familiar from previous versions is no longer available; only the assessment tool is available.

To help ANGEL users learn more about the features of ANGEL 7.4, on Aug. 16 a free “ANGEL: What’s New in ANGEL 7.4” workshop will be offered at 3:00 p.m. in 23 Willard Building, University Park or via an Adobe Connect videoconference. On Aug. 17, an ANGEL 7.4 Town Hall will be held in 116 Wagner Building, University Park or via Connect. A town hall is an open discussion where in-depth exploration of new tools and features takes place with time available for questions and answers. To register for either session, visit the ITS Training Services site at http://its.psu.edu/training/.

ANGEL users can also learn more about how to use new ANGEL features by viewing a set of animated tutorials at http://its.psu.edu/training/learnonline/.

A small update was applied to ANGEL this morning. Most of the changes were on the backend, but there are some changes that you may notice:

• An issue that caused the library reserves link to not be generated correctly in merged courses was fixed. Unfortunately, this fix is not retroactive; while merges created from today forward will have correct library reserves links any merges created before today may not. If you have already created a merged course and use library reserves in it please ask ANGEL Support (residential education courses) or the World Campus Help Desk (Outreach and World Campus courses) to fix the link manually for you.
• An issue that caused the library reserves link to sometimes be generated incorrectly for courses with spaces or ampersands in the department abbreviation has been resolved by ANGEL and the Libraries.
• When students attempted to access a drop box that was created in ANGEL 6.2 or earlier (before 2006) and never edited by an instructor since then, an error message was generated. This issue has been resolved.
• We've mitigated an issue that causes course assistants to not be able to access grading features in a course.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact ANGEL Support.