ANGEL Community Hub

The ANGEL team has received feedback that it's difficult for course editors/instructors to tell whether an item is available to students or hidden from them. The icons for items that are hidden are "greyed out" (have a lower opacity) than the icons for items that are available to students.

To address this issue, the ANGEL team has created a new set of icons that we plan to release in a future update. We would like the community's feedback on these icons.
Please take a moment to review this image of the Lessons tab in grid mode with the new icons, then vote in the poll. If you have any suggestions for the icons, please make them in the comments.

Update: this update was applied to ANGEL on August 19.

We're planning an update to ANGEL that will make three noticeable changes. Details are available by clicking the Read More link. If you have any questions or concerns about how this will affect you, please contact ANGEL Support.

This update is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, August 19. It will be the last scheduled update planned for ANGEL until late September, so no new changes will be introduced before the start of the fall semester.

In the past, ANGEL Support has posted notes here after an update was applied. Due to changing roles and time constraints that hasn't happened a while.

We've received feedback from the ANGEL community that updates sometimes bring unexpected changes in functionality and can be disruptive. The ANGEL team takes this feedback seriously. We're going to try something new to help address this concern and post a note here about upcoming updates before they happen. We can't guarantee that this will happen for every update; sometimes a change needs to be pushed to ANGEL urgently to correct an issue, or we may not have enough lead time on an update to get together a notice, or staff may not be available to post something.

On July 30, 2009, Information Technology Services performed an update on ANGEL to improve the usability of the inline HTML editor. In most areas where the HTML editor is available, it will now load automatically without the need to first click the "HTML Editor" link. This change should correct issues that some users have experienced with line breaks and formatting not being retained.

Please note that the HTML editor will not load automatically in a few text areas, including the message field in drop boxes, some text fields encountered when creating or editing a question in a quiz or survey, and the answer field in essay questions when taking a quiz. To use the editor in these areas, you will still need to select the "HTML Editor" link beneath the text box. If you do not see the HTML editor when composing ANGEL mail messages, please enter your inbox, click preferences, select the HTML format for your mail messages, and save.

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

On July 20, two ANGEL features are being updated: 1) the way in which discussion forums are displayed in the Discussion Forums component on the course Communicate tab, and 2) what a course editor sees on the Activity Detail report for a lesson content item if tracking is disabled.

Users will now find up-to-date documentation when they click the Help (?) button within ANGEL (or go directly to http://angelkb.ais.psu.edu).

Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL (http://cms.psu.edu), was upgraded from version 7.1 to version 7.3 during the weekend of May 16. The new version of ANGEL features enhancements to several existing tools, and several new tools will help course editors perform administrative tasks. For the most part, however, the functionality should remain familiar to users. To learn more about the new features in version 7.3, please visit: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/about/news/2009/angel-to-be-upgraded-to-version-7.3-weekend-of-may-16 . For more information, please contact ANGEL Support