ANGEL TIP: USING THE COURSE ANNOUNCEMENTS TOOL EFFECTIVELY

The Course Announcements nugget is a common place many instructors use to communicate important information to their students. Do realize, however, that whatever you put in this nugget is also visible on the Personal Home Page (the page you see after logging in to ANGEL but before you select a class) in the My Announcements nugget.

This functionality can be helpful if you have information you want students to see even before they log into your class. However, you should be aware that if you include some kind of formatted content, like a large image or a table, your announcement could affect the appearance of the Personal Home Page for all of your students. If you include something (like an image or a table) that cannot collapse to a smaller width, it will cause the whole column that includes the My Announcements nugget to remain at that width. This causes the other columns to shrink to smaller widths, which can make it difficult for students to locate their courses or read other content.

If you want to make an announcement in your course that does not appear on the Personal Home Page, you can consider using the Course News nugget rather than the Course Announcements nugget.

Thanks to Tracy Newman for sharing this tip.

Email from Students Now?

We’ve had several questions about email being received by instructors in ANGEL before the course is opened to student access. Here's why this is occurring: Students can send email from their ANGEL personal home page, even before logging into a specific course and before the course is open. They can send email to any course in which they are enrolled. See Course Mail > Quick Message, click the To: button and then under Source, select (from the drop-down list) the course you want to send a message to. Then you can select the individual in that course to whom you want to send a message.