ANGEL Community Hub

Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL (http://cms.psu.edu), will be upgraded from version 7.1 to version 7.3 the weekend of May 16. The new version of ANGEL will feature enhancements to several existing tools, and several new tools will help course editors perform administrative tasks. Users will also see several minor interface changes. For the most part, however, the functionality will remain familiar to users. Learn more about the new features in version 7.3.

From 6:00 p.m. Friday, May 15 to 6:00 a.m. Monday, May 18, ANGEL will be unavailable while Information Technology Services (ITS) performs the upgrade. ITS regrets any inconvenience this outage may cause. For any questions, contact ANGEL support at angelsupport@psu.edu.

Is there any way students can pick their own teams in ANGEL?

An update was applied to ANGEL during the maintenance window this morning which included the following fixes and enhancements:

• Quota Meter We've added a revamped version of the quota meter tool to help course and group editors keep track of how much space is being used in their courses and groups. For more information and instructions on how to use it, please refer to this knowledgebase article.
• New mail notifications for courses that have ended will no longer be shown to students. When an instructor set an end date for a course using Manage > General Settings, the course will become unavailable to students after that date. There was an issue that caused notifications for any unread email in that course to still be shown even though the messages were no longer available to students. This is now fixed and the new mail notifications should no longer be shown to students.
• There was an issue that caused discussion forum posts to be automatically be marked read and no email notification to be sent if a course editor and any student are both subscribed to a forum and either of them posted in that forum. This is now fixed.
• While taking a quiz with short answer, fill in the blank, or multiple fill in the blank questions, pressing enter while answering one of those questions would cause the quiz to be submitted. This will no longer occur.
• The new Student Rating of Teaching Effectiveness (SRTE) nugget is now shown on the profile page. Please note that this nugget by design cannot be removed. However, you can move it from its default location by clicking the Edit Page link in the upper left of the profile, dragging the My Evaluations(SRTE) nugget to a new location, and pressing save.
• Several bug fixes and enhancements were made to CSCS.

Questions? Comments? Please contact ANGEL Support.

Users of Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL (http://cms.psu.edu/), should be aware that once they have logged in, if they have been inactive for 90 minutes, their session will time out and they will be logged off. Five minutes before the 90 minutes of inactivity have elapsed, a message will pop up asking the user whether he or she wishes to continue the ANGEL session. If the user clicks the “Stay Connected” button in the pop-up message, the session will continue. If 90 minutes of inactivity have elapsed and the user has been logged off, in order to start a new session, he or she must close all Web browsers, then again open a browser and log on to ANGEL.

Over the course of a year, ITS worked on developing a strategy for ANGEL at Penn State in the coming years. The attached ANGEL Vision document serves to explain that strategy. This document serves two distinct purposes. The first is to outline some new thinking as it relates to the overall flexibility of ANGEL as we move forward. The second is to highlight future architectural goals in anticipation of continued growth and increased demand of ANGEL throughout the university. ITS will use this document as we continue to pursue our strategic partnership with ANGEL Learning, Inc.

I have heard that there have been issues with faculty importing grades from ANGEL into E-Lion. I would like to know if there is something specific that I can look at in the ANGEL grade book to make sure that it will import into E-Lion successfully. Is there something that has to be a certain way in order for the import to work that would be easy for an ID to find and help the faculty correct?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Faculty members at University Park who would like one-on-one tutoring on teaching, learning, and class management tools can apply to have a technology-savvy student help them acquire computer skills on a range of topics. Through the Technology Learning Assistant (TLA) program, students tutor faculty in their offices on PowerPoint, Excel, file management, e-mail, Web page development, electronic gradebook software, and other applications and tools. TLAs can also demonstrate how to use Penn State services such as ANGEL, podcasting and iTunes U, Adobe Connect desktop videoconferencing, ITS Streaming Services, and the Blogs at Penn State.