ANGEL Community Hub

On Wednesday, April 2 from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., students, faculty, and staff are encouraged to participate in free a training session and webinar that focuses on the development of universally accessible digital courses and Web pages for all Internet users, including individuals with disabilities. Participants can join the live seminar in 101 Foster Auditorium, Pattee Library, University Park or online via Adobe Connect at http://breeze.psu.edu/atdemo/. For more information, see http://its.psu.edu/accesstoall/.

To optimize the performance of Penn State's Course Management System, ANGEL, during spring finals week, the Import Wizard and Export Wizard tools will be turned off from 5:00 a.m. Saturday, May 3 until 7:00 a.m. Saturday, May 10. These tools include the Copy Course, import Content Package, import Master Course, and export ANGEL Archive functions. The tools for importing and exporting individual lesson content items between courses and groups will be turned off as well. These temporary changes for that week are one of a number of steps that have been taken to improve ANGEL performance during the period of intense usage associated with finals week.

Please contact ANGEL Support with any questions.

General

• several backend fixes and enhancements
• the "high security" setting is now for quizzes and surveys in all classes. You (and the eTesting Center) no longer need to request that this be enabled if you use the eTesting Center. Please note that this setting makes a quiz available only from the eTesting Center. It should not be used unless you are giving a quiz in the eTesting Center as your quizzes will not be available to your students.
• zip archives generated by the Download Submission tool in drop boxes will now have a .zip extension in Firefox
• a situation in which a person's name might not be correctly pulled into ANGEL was fixed

CSCS

• several minor bug fixes
• contact information for ANGEL Support was updated
• a bug that caused line breaks to not be shown in reviewer comments in the print view and view history is resolved
• additional instructions requested by the Faculty Senate were added to the course proposal form
• locations of past course offerings are now displayed in the proposal print view

Please take a moment to read the following note from Information Technology Services regarding lessons learned from the interruptions in ANGEL availability at the end of the semeste . -Jeff

Penn State's Course Management System (ANGEL) experienced unprecedented and unanticipated performance problems during the fall semester finals week. Since that time ITS has dedicated extensive resources investigating the disruption to this critical system.

How are we addressing what we are learning about the ANGEL interruptions during finals week?

Please take a moment to read the following note from Information Technology Services regarding moving course content at the beginning of the semester. -Jeff

With the spring 2008 semester fast approaching, instructors are returning to town and preparing their courses, which includes creating and placing content into ANGEL, the Penn State Course Management System.

ANGEL continues to grow in popularity with over 250,000 student course section enrollments (63% of the total course sections offered) this past semester. This increase in use, while most certainly welcomed, presents challenges.

Oh boy, you're probably thinking, another exciting update post. But wait! This one includes something that I think will make a lot of instructors very happy. We've introduced a feature that will make downloading drop box submissions more efficient and allow you to more easily identify who submitted what. Click Read More for information about the new tool.

We also made some changes to CSCS. When submitting a proposal, CSCS records who submitted it AND who the faculty member the submission was made on behalf of. The submitter information is now shown on the first page when creating a proposal, and will be filled in automatically with data from LDAP. People reviewing a proposal are now asked to provide their title, department, and campus. This information will also be filled in automatically with data from LDAP.

An update was applied to ANGEL during the maintenance window this morning. The only change visible in the UI is that group creation is now working.

Please contact ANGEL Support if you have any questions.