ANGEL Community Hub

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.

Allan & I provided an overview of what to expect in ANGEL 7 for the Department of Dairy and Animal Science (DAS) on May 7th. DAS recorded the sessions and was kind enough to allow us to share it.

DAS Presentation

Allan & I attended the ANGEL User's Conference in Indianapolis, May 15 & 16. We were able to conduct a few interviews in between sessions, over lunch, and during dinner with some interesting folks. Thought you might find these interesting:

Interview with John Meyer from ANGEL Learning

Interview with David Massey, Indian Hills Community College

Interview with David Mills, ANGEL Learning

Interview with folks from West Texas A&M

Allan and I completed a brief (under 10 minutes) preview of ANGEL v7 for Penn State as it looks now. We cover, at a high level, the new buttons that replace the text links on the left-hand side of the page, the guide tool which incorporates such tools as the course map and what's new, we look at some of the things that have stayed the same, e.g. the syllabus and lessons tab plus we look at the new tabs (resources, communicate, reports, and manage). This is a quick once-over demonstration designed to let you know what to expect when we upgrade at the end of the spring semester.

Jeff and I thought that a quick run-through of features in ANGEL 7.1 would be useful for people who don't have the time to wade through all of the other vodcasts. So here it is...a 35 minute overview of the new features in ANGEL 7.1. One thing to note: not all of these will appear as you see them in this recording. For example, we are going back to a simple Syllabus tab instead of the Course tab (which is redundant with the Resources tab).

If you'd like to see this overview, the vodcast is available through iTunesU.

In this vodcast, Jeff and I look at the new Learning Object Repository tool in ANGEL, which is similar to some of the things you could do with the Resource Libraries. They're a bit tricky, especially when you get into the useful (but mysterious) publishing option -- that should, in theory, let you push content from a repository to several courses at once. Well, we couldn't figure it out in this vodcast, but I think you'll see how such a tool could be useful.

If you'd like to see us in action, the vodcast is available through iTunesU.

In this vodcast, Jeff Swain and I go through the features in the new Guide Tool that will be available with ANGEL 7. The guide tool combines map, search, what's new, ungraded items, and instructional design tips into a single interface. It's quite useful, as long as you can figure out what each of the sections mean and how to navigate them.

The New Guide Tool vodcast is available through iTunesU.