ANGEL Community Hub

Available to all dfaculty to use this semester are:

-The ANGEL Course Gradebook
-Discussion Forums
-Penn Test Test Tools

The ANGEL Course Gradebook can be activated by instructor from the profile page by going into the settings link under the course name and selecting the Course Gradebook option. Instructors can also choose to keep using the Online Grade Report this semester. However, come spring the Course Gradebook will be the only option and appear in courses by default.

Discussion Forums can be found under the Lessons tab/Add Content. They are replacing message boards. For the fall semester instructors can create discussion forums or import and use old message boards. Come spring message boards will no longer be available. It is important to note that discussion forums can be associated and used with the gradebook however message boards cannot.

The Penn State Test Tool link is available under Lessons/Add Content. Instructors can use this tool to link with the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence to pull in grades for scanned bubble sheets and Test Pilot. These grades are compatible with the Gradebook.

When publishing course grades it is important that the instructor do this for all students in order to make everyone's grade available in eLion. To ensure this:

1. Go into the gradebook prior to going to eLion
2. Select the "Publish Course Grades" link
3. Select "Final" from the drop-down menu and select "Go"
4. Select "ALL" from the Display option and select "Go"
5. Verify that all the students names appear and that the grades are correct
6. Make any necessary changes
7. Select "Publish Displayed Grades" at the bottom of the page

Note: If you have a large class you may want to omit Step 4 and publish grades only for the students names displayed and replace it with using the Previous/Next links at the bottom of the page.

Feel free to share the message below from Rodney Erickson:

To Members of ALC and PC:

To date, Penn State has been fortunate, and perhaps lucky. We have not experienced the problems a growing number of other colleges and universities have in the form of security breaches that have compromised confidential student, employee, or alumni information. Although some of these security breaches have occurred as a result of hacking into the enterprise systems of the universities, a significant majority of the breaches have occurred because of human error and bad judgment. The two articles referenced below both indicate only the most recent examples wherein laptops were stolen that contained information that should never have resided on the machines in the first place; the faculty member at Cal Poly had saved social security numbers along with the names of students in his classes for a full decade. The costs in staff time, potential fines, and damage to an institution’s reputation from such breaches are great. We have thousands of probes to our IT network everyday, and it takes a major effort to fend off these attacks. But Penn State is only as protected as the least secure machines and the weakest level of data stewardship that is maintained on the vast array of distributed equipment across the University. We need everyone’s help in this effort to reduce our risk. I would appreciate your assistance in putting this information into the hands of faculty and staff who currently have access to confidential or identity information, and to those who may be unaware of the dangers lurking in their machines or their file drawers from years gone by.

Check out this article in today's Collegian: http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2006/08/08-07-06tdc/08-07-06dnews-02.asp

Brian Smith is using Facebook as the cms in one of his courses this fall. A quote from the article that piqued my interest was: "Computing is decentralized anyway, he {Smith} said, but Facebook may be the right place to do more communicating." As many of you who've listened to me evangelicize know, this is the primary thrust behind the concept of "Liquid ANGEL", making ANGEL compatible, and a part of, these powerful tools that our population heavily uses. These tools are decentralized yet bound together by links and tags and compiled by aggregators. Partnering with them is a powerful way to keep ANGEL relevant with our users.

The following bugs have been reported to ANGEL Learning:

1. The Anonymous setting is not exactly anonymous. When the user selects a message and then selects the threaded view, the user ID's appear.

2. The Setup Wizard is not working. After you select a discussion forum format (e.g. fishbowl) and select continue you receive an error message. It is recommended that discussion forums be setup manually rather than using the wizard until this problem is corrected.

I will keep you posted as we progress towards resolution.

This fall we will be piloting several tools with ANGEL: Discussion forums, the Course Gradebook, and the Penn Test Test Tool. These will be available to all faculty beginning 8/16 although we will not be actively marketing them until later in August.

Faculty will be able to opt-into the course gradebook when they enable the course. The discussion forums and test pilot tools will be available under Lessons/Add Content.

FYI: documentation on all this will be going out to all support staff in early August.

We are waiting word from ANGEL Learning regarding the Math editor. Hopefully, we will have a tool to pilot in September/October. I'll keep you posted.

Feel free to share this information with other support staff team members.

You probably heard that course sizes in ANGEL are set at 1gig and group sizes are set to 300meg. You can see how much space you are using by going into your group and:
-Selecting the Content tab
-Selecting the Utilities link
-Selecting the Associated File Manager link

The amount of space you are currently using in your group will be displayed at the top of the page.