ANGEL Community Hub

On July 28, Information Technology Services installed ANGEL service pack updates from Blackboard. The updates addressed numerous issues that had been reported. These are detailed below. (See also a previous post on the ANGEL Community Hub.)

This seems like a rather elementary but puzzling problem. If an instructor wants to online office hours via Angel for all their classes (in this case 4), is there an easy way to do it? We've come up with three ways, and none of them are very good...

1. Using 4 separate browser windows

2. Creating a merged section with all four classes

3. Using breeze instead (this is problematic because of the lack of a queueing system )

I figured I couldn't be the only one to run into this conundrum. Any thoughts or ideas?

On June 16, several minor updates were made to the Course Submission & Consultation System (CSCS) within ANGEL.

Effective August 2, the ANGEL Help and Information Guide, accessed by clicking the question mark button on the left side of the ANGEL screen, will be incorporated into a new system, the Information Technology Services (ITS) Knowledge Base, which contains documentation on a wide variety of technology topics and Penn State services.

There are only very minor differences in the interface from the former help system. For example, in the old system, the advanced search options were displayed on the screen by default. In the new system, you must select the Advanced Search link beneath the keyword search box to be able to search for an exact phrase or to search only within a particular category.

If you wish to open the ANGEL Help and Information Guide when you are not within ANGEL, it is now located at http://kb.its.psu.edu/cms. In addition, all article numbers have changed. Persons who have bookmarked specific articles (or the guide as a whole) or who link to articles on their Web pages will need to update the URLs.

The next update to ANGEL is tentatively scheduled for July 28, 2010. This is a large update from Blackboard/ANGEL Learning that includes over 100 fixes and enhancements. I'm not going to list them here but would like to call your attention to an important change in this update that will change the way that team permissions are handled when copying content from one course to another. Please note these changes come from Blackboard/ANGEL Learning and not PSU. Please don't shoot the messenger. :)

Essentially, the team settings on lessons/content items will no longer be retained when copying content from one course to another. All items in the new course will be available to all teams. This applies to both using "selected teams" on the access tab as well as using team overrides. Similarly, discussion forum post permissions will no longer be retained when copying forums from course to course. The forums in the new course will be set to whatever the default permissions were for the original forum—almost always none, making these forums available only to course editors.

We've already submitted a ticket to Blackboard/ANGEL Learning explaining the use cases for why team permissions should be retained for copying content and have asked them to either undo these changes or, preferably, provide course editors with the option to select whether or not to retain these settings when copying content.

Please contact ANGEL Support if you have any questions.

An update was applied to ANGEL during the maintenance window this morning, resolving several issues in ANGEL and CSCS. Enhancements for CSCS are also included in this update. For details on these fixes and enhancements, please click the read more link. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact ANGEL Support.

The next update for ANGEL is tentatively scheduled for early July.

A small update was applied to ANGEL this morning that fixed a problem with error messages being shown when your ANGEL session timed out.

The next ANGEL update is tentatively scheduled for June.

(This article was edited to correct "March" in the title to "May").