Tag: ANGEL

ANGEL: Certificate-Generating Tool Instructions

I met with a group of IDs and IPSs from Outreach to present on some work that I did while working on a solution for the PSU School of Nursing.

I have documented my overview, procedures, and implementation notes in an Evernote: “ANGEL: Certificate-Generating Tool Instructions“.

This project covers the design, development and implementation of a solution that was developed to automatically generate certificates-of-completion for participants taking online continuing education credits. Nurses in PA need to maintain professional development credits in an ongoing basis. PSU Outreach worked with the School of Nursing to develop self-paced online learning that would satisfy this need.

A look back at February

It’s been a long month. I really wanted to do weekly reflections, but that just didn’t work out. This post roughly covers topics since my last post, but kind of covers the last 30 days.SPAN 001-003 RevisionsAssessment FeedbackDifferences between SPAN…

It’s been a long month. I really wanted to do weekly reflections, but that just didn’t work out. This post roughly covers topics since my last post, but kind of covers the last 30 days.
SPAN 001-003 Revisions
Assessment Feedback
Differences between SPAN 001 and 003
Roll-over Templates
Audio Files in Assessments
New Instructors don’t touch courses
fixed gradebook
Release Dates and Grades, Early Progress Reports
Editing PDF’s
Fixing Flashcards
M&LD
Deafblind canceled
OL2000 finishes

TLT Videos

ALA Logistics and Planning for March Session
Budget
Gathering Content and Storyboarding
Draft
Future action plan based on these reflections?
  • Take a big breath when working on Spanish. We’ve done an incredible amount of work. Patty has assisted me with the majority of our 110 individual tasks since we began tracking them and that list isn’t fully comprehensive.

C&I Leadership Academy

PeopleAttending: Rick & Nancy Eckard (Conference Planner)Lead faculty: Bob Hendrickson rmh6 (Education Policy Studies)TA’s: Zeke Kimball ewk124 & Phil Blackman pcb141; consider succession planning through the end of the programFollow-up Facilitator: Lisa Luttuca (Associate Professor)ScheduleF2F Conference, 1 week, 6/29-7/2, begins…

People

  • Attending: Rick & Nancy Eckard (Conference Planner)
  • Lead faculty: Bob Hendrickson rmh6 (Education Policy Studies)
  • TA’s: Zeke Kimball ewk124 & Phil Blackman pcb141; consider succession planning through the end of the program
  • Follow-up Facilitator: Lisa Luttuca (Associate Professor)

Schedule

  • F2F Conference, 1 week, 6/29-7/2, begins on a Sunday-that evening there will be a keynote
  • 9 months to follow-up with readings and discussions

Background

  • participants are generally associate deans and department heads
  • modeled after a program at Harvard that was designed for higher-level administrators, a more intense and expensive program
  • this program is for 2nd tier administrators of smaller institutions and colleges

Description

  • Program Website: http://www.outreach.psu.edu/programs/academic-leadership/
  • non-credit certificate program
  • program capped at 30 participants
  • required hardware? laptops for everyone?
  • costs: IT support $32/person; ≈$300 for E-Live; $720 for ID support
  • F2F Conference Week
    • Rick: we’d need at least 2 hours for training (probably on the last day in the morning)
    • located at the Nittany Lion Inn, Ball Room AB
      • Rick: connectivity? free wifi? wired connection and projector for the presenters?
    • different presenters for the morning and afternoon sessions
    • Pre-conference: run E-Live tests
  • Follow-up
    • each month will have a focus
    • faculty leader (Lisa) for each month
    • there will likely be guest speakers each month
    • primarily independent work during the month and discussions and debrief
    • ANGEL Group
      • PSU-ID’s will be used
      • some participants will need to be added manually
      • the SOAR team should be able to automatically link the ANGEL Group to their listing in SOAR
    • E-Live Session(s)

Next Steps

  • determine what will be put into ANGEL
  • determine what Bob’s level of preparation is; we’ll need a course outline for each online session; how much time will the participants have to dedicate for prep each month?
  • materials? Library’s eReserves for copyrighted materials/articles; students may need support turning on access for their accounts to link with the Library
  • what are they going to do for 3 hours? will the participants be grouped in the activities?
  • setup E-Live sessions for the entire year; no need for performance release needed
  • will the E-Live sessions be recorded? if yes, then we’ll need separate sessions; if no, then we won’t
  • setup a skeleton in ANGEL based on the tentative schedule from the portal
  • we need to map out at least the first few months

ANGEL Assessment Tool (AAT) Training

Link to previous entryMeeting NotesNatalie will cover the theory and definitions of the AAT vs. Quizzes. I’ve requested access to the presentation. Questions [Bank] (Manage Tab) are linked to Assessments (Lesson Tab)Question Sets – way of organizing a series of…

Link to previous entry

Meeting Notes

  • Natalie will cover the theory and definitions of the AAT vs. Quizzes. I’ve requested access to the presentation. Questions [Bank] (Manage Tab) are linked to Assessments (Lesson Tab)
  • Question Sets – way of organizing a series of questions within an assessment
  • Question Pool – presented as a question type… it is a query on the course question bank, they are pulled randomly, use question sets to “un-randomly” choose questions
  • Why should we add questions to the QB? Because this is part of the new paradigm. We should be thinking about adding all of our questions into the QB eventually.
  • Louise: Our top priority is to convert all quizzes into the AAT.
  • Store screenshots of quizzes as hidden PDF’s in the actual courses.

Nursing Online CE Updates

I’ve notified SON and CAPE about the new version of ANGEL’s Assessments broken GOTO advanced actions (the resulting page is blank). We’ll have to resort to alerts to assist students along the course process. I was also considering using Presenter’s…

I’ve notified SON and CAPE about the new version of ANGEL’s Assessments broken GOTO advanced actions (the resulting page is blank). We’ll have to resort to alerts to assist students along the course process. I was also considering using Presenter’s built-in quizzing features as an alternative.

Madeline had me change some colors in PPT because they wouldn’t print in B&W. I just checked and we shouldn’t have to worry about that since that seems to occur when participants are printing directly from PPT. Students only have PDF’s to print from and as long as they look good, then participants will get good prints. Looking at the printing more carefully, I began to wonder if we should offer B&W versions. The problem there is that the Penn State Mark and “SON” do not appear at the bottom of each slide.
6008_slide10_bw.png
6008_slide10_color.pngI was also wondering if we should include full-sized references, but began to think that is going too far for a .1CEU non-credit course. The information is available online and the students can copy that info if they really want to.

ANGEL 7.4 Assessments losing images

When converting a 7.3 quiz to a 7.4 assessment, you will lose any images that were added to any of your questions – except if you save those resources to your own, personal ANGEL space (limited to 10 MB).7.4 assessments…

When converting a 7.3 quiz to a 7.4 assessment, you will lose any images that were added to any of your questions – except if you save those resources to your own, personal ANGEL space (limited to 10 MB).

7.4 assessments create virtual directories serialize specifically for each question for associated resources, like images. You cannot access those virtual directories by any traditional means from within ANGEL as a course editor.

In order to move a picture from a 7.3 quiz to a 7.4 assessment you must:

  1. download all of your images from your quiz
  2. save all of the metadata (image properties, alt tags, links, etc.)
  3. browse to the specific assessment question and re-upload each image and restore it’s properties one-by-one

Kate and I think this might be because of how 7.4 assessments handle the question bank. Questions are now “free to move” between assessments and therefore need individual, serialized, virtual directories to maintain question integrity no matter where the question might appear.

ANGEL Content: Links

Link content items are commonly used in ANGEL courses. Links are easy to share and can be use to display external content in or from ANGEL.I have been trying to create a “clean” link from ANGEL into a new window,…

Link content items are commonly used in ANGEL courses. Links are easy to share and can be use to display external content in or from ANGEL.

I have been trying to create a “clean” link from ANGEL into a new window, but I’ve noticed that even without a banner, the new content is still displayed internally in ANGEL looking at the URL. So, how can I create a link from the Lesson’s tab that opens a page that is “free” from the ANGEL CMS?

What are the best practices for displaying the content externally to ANGEL or keeping an integrated look by displaying that content in ANGEL?

ANGEL Assessment Tool

Does it do everything the Quiz tool does? I would say so.Drop-down list has been dropped but I won’t miss it. It’s basically a differently-formatted multiple choice question.There’s an algorithmic option that might be the same as the Calculated Question…

  1. Does it do everything the Quiz tool does? I would say so.
    1. Drop-down list has been dropped but I won’t miss it. It’s basically a differently-formatted multiple choice question.
    2. There’s an algorithmic option that might be the same as the Calculated Question type under Wizards and Templates.
    3. How can I import questions into an assessment? The option is now called Copy and Paste Questions.
  2. What does it do better than the Quiz tool? What does the Quiz tool do better?
  3. What do we need to know about it? One good resource is the ANGEL Shorts edition dedicated to this topic.
    5 Things About Assessment Tool.pdf
  4. Where can we go with questions?
  5. What do faculty members need to know about the tool?
  6. How does the migration tool work?
  7. Have there been any problems with the tool?
    1. Issue discovered with changing answers in the assessment tool (Tue 9 Feb)

      Information Technology Services (ITS) has identified a problem with the assessment tool in ANGEL.  If a student changes an answer to a question before submitting it, the new answer may not be properly recorded. This problem occurs in two situations:

      1.  When IP address filtering is enabled. This will happen with either Firefox or Internet Explorer, regardless of any other assessment settings.

      2.  Loss of Internet connectivity or application timing out.

      As a result of these situations,  any student who changes his or her mind about the answer to a particular question will find that only the original selection was saved, not the new selection, in the submitted version of the quiz.

      ITS is working is working with ANGEL/Blackboard on a solution to this problem.

      If you have any questions, please contact us at ANGELSupport@psu.edu.

  8. Will the tool be implemented? I just spoke with Ravi, Natalie, and Kate and they gave strong indications that there a some serious issues with the Assessments tool. Ravi said that the tool shouldn’t be implemented because 7.4 does not support quizzes and we would lose them as reference when checking the newly migrated assessments. We all agreed that the new tool is nice (after the major bugs, see 7, have been fixed) when starting from scratch, but it the migration aspect that’s killing the process.

What to consider when selecting a Photo-sharing service for your class?

An instructor recently contacted me about the option of using a photo-sharing service for her photography class with CE@UP. I don’t have a lot of details about the course and her expectations, but there are a few things to think…

An instructor recently contacted me about the option of using a photo-sharing service for her photography class with CE@UP. I don’t have a lot of details about the course and her expectations, but there are a few things to think about that would apply to a number of different situations (roughly in order of importance):

  • uploading options
  • organization of the content
  • storage limits
  • bandwidth limits
  • view options: full-screen slideshows
  • sharing options
  • log-in requirements
  • visitor requirements
  • privacy and permissions
  • metadata options
  • service reliability
  • read the fine-print
  • Web 2.0 framework
  • service popularity
  • licensing options
  • statistics
  • printing options

Email from ANGEL Drop boxes are being updated

Dawn Lorenz, an instructor for CE@UP’s RHS 301 course, made me aware that if an instructor sends an email from the clickable option from the grading feature on a drop box, the resulting course mail is flagged as a low…

Dawn Lorenz, an instructor for CE@UP’s RHS 301 course, made me aware that if an instructor sends an email from the clickable option from the grading feature on a drop box, the resulting course mail is flagged as a low priority message.
screencap_low_priority_emails_sent_from_dropboxes.jpgI asked the Outreach Helpdesk about the issue and they said they will keep their eye on the situation after the next ANGEL update on Jan 23rd, 2010. However, this is actually part of a related but bigger bug. Those course mails cannot be replied to successfully. If a student receives a course mail generated from the drop box feature and he or she wants to reply to that email, perhaps they disagree with the grade or have a question about it, the mail is lost in the ether. Apparently the bug doesn’t correctly add the proper “reply to” address and the message is never received by the instructor. This has of course led to some problems.

As of now, I have asked the Helpdesk to hold tight on passing the “low priority” query to the ANGEL Ops team until they fix the bigger bug. The Helpdesk will do their own testing on the “low priority” query after the upgrade later this month.