TLT Community Hubs

To optimize the performance of Penn State's Course Management System, ANGEL, during fall finals week, the Import Wizard and Export Wizard tools will be turned off from 4:00 a.m. Saturday, December 12 until 6:00 a.m. Saturday, December 19. These tools include the Copy Course, import Content Package, import Master Course, and export ANGEL Archive functions. Note: During finals week, instructors can continue to create course content and create master courses and learning object repositories. Students can continue to upload/download files and access lesson content.
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I am working with an instructor on a course that uses 90 min, timed quizzes. The quizzes are available during a short, 30 min window of opportunity. Some of the settings for the quiz are:
• disabled time warning under "Time settings"
• "Automatically submit when time limit expires" is selected
• Max attempts = 1
• "Warn about incomplete items" is selected
• auto save is disabled
• "Do not allow users to save and finish later" is selected
• Full Review is selected
The problem we're having is, say a student logs on 1 minute before the quiz closes and they complete the quiz before the 90 min and submit it, ANGEL shows the results as expected...
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For a long time, I have always believed that if a number of assignments are lumped under one category, and if there are more than one category in the gradebook, those assignments must bear equal number of max points or the calculation would not be correct. It seems that there are exceptions.
Exception 1: there is only one category called "course grade" and the gradebook is in "point" mode.
Exception 2: there are more than one category, and the gradebook can be of "point" or "percentage" mode, but the weight of each category are numbers in terms of points, such as "auto-calculate." That is the last line on the Category screen shows the total points of the course (such as 600) and 100%.
Any others?

A small update is planned for October 7, 2009 during the maintenance window. For details please click read more. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact ANGEL Support.
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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.
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Faculty members are invited to share innovative uses of technology to enhance teaching, learning, and research at the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. This free event will be held Saturday, March 27, 2010 from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel, University Park. A continental breakfast and lunch will be provided. This year's theme is "Digital Scholarship and the Culture of Teaching and Learning."
The keynote speaker is Dr. Michael Wesch (http://ksuanth.weebly.com/wesch.html), assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University. Dubbed "the explainer" by Wired magazine, Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. His videos on culture, technology, education, and information have been featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award and the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research Universities.

I'm looking for some help with CSS coded pages in ANGEL. I'm relatively new to CSS and have been pleasantly surprised that ANGEL can play well with CSS pages. (I'm working in a test ANGEL group called "Kent's Sandbox.")
Here's a link to the archive (http://www.personal.psu.edu/kkm11/files/css_angel_example.zip) of the very simple site I'm working with.
I know ANGEL can display my CSS properly. I uploaded the archive and this what I see (right-click to view a full-size version of the images):

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I searched for this, but can't find it..
A faculty member has used the Whodunit report to see who has NOT contributed to a discussion - Didn't there used to be a feature to e-mail the people who had not done it yet?
I tried the following but....
Now I see you can send a report from Whodunit - but when I click on that - it attaches the list as a pdf of all the folks who did not contribute yet - but doesn't automatically populate them in the "to" - That's not a huge deal, except students could see everyone on the list which wouldn't be preferable I don't think - if my goal isn't to embarrass, but simply to nudge...
Is there another way to do this?
Thanks!!

As reports of cases of the H1N1 flu virus increase around the country, Penn State recognizes that large numbers of faculty and students may be unable to teach or attend classes due to illness or because they are home-bound, caring for family members. ANGEL, Penn State's course management system (https://cms.psu.edu/default.asp), can be a vital resource for sustaining the continuity of your class during this time. ANGEL can assist instructors with delivering content to students, by fostering communication and discussion between instructors and students as well as student-to-student communication, and by providing a medium for assessment and feedback. Below are some steps instructors can take using ANGEL in order to continue teaching and learning activities with minimal disruption even if classroom attendance or traditional instruction is not possible.
Adding Robust Content to Your ANGEL Course
You can upload a wide variety of file types into ANGEL for students to download, including Web pages, text documents, spreadsheets, slide presentations, audio files, and more. Almost all file types are supported within ANGEL, although it is important...read more
Fostering Communication and Discussion
ANGEL has several kinds of communication tools to aid instructors with keeping the students informed as well as maintaining class discussion and interaction. These tools include Discussion Forums, Course Mail, Live Chat as well as Announcements and Polls...read more

Can anyone tell me what the limit is for the number of characters that an instructor can put into the text box (remarks field) when commenting on student submissions to the drop box. An instructor was showing me that comments she made there are now truncated - too long.. and she doesn't want to use attachments. She siad she used to be able to put longer comments there.
Thanks!