Drop Box Language Dropped

By default, when a Drop Box is created in ANGEL, a text message (“Enter or paste your written work…”) appears in addition to whatever instructions the Course Editor sets. Often, we've found the default language contradicts the instructions added by the faculty member, so the system administrator has eliminated the default language. There will be no instructions unless the instructor adds them when creating a Drop Box.

Warning: Poll Error

If your course includes a Poll and you try to view poll results as a Course Editor (instructor), you’ll see an exception error…until the poll is taken by one of your students. The error is evidently generated by the lack of data. ANGEL shouldn’t generate an error, of course, so we’re reporting it as a bug to ANGEL.

Regarding Assessments, Did You Know?

Deleting a Question
If you delete a question from a question bank, that question will still exist in any assessments in which it has been used. If you then go and delete the question in all assessments within the course, the question will still exist if any student has taken any of the assessments in which the question appeared.

Importing Questions
If a publisher provides an assessment question bank for use in your course(s),

1. First, request the question bank in common cartridge format (ANGEL supports),
2. If not available, request in ANGEL format,
3. If not available, request in Blackboard format.

Re-grading Questions
You have three options:

1. Change the point value,
2. Drop the question entirely,
3. Give full credit.

Question Sets, Banks and Pools

Because of the terminology shift from Blackboard to ANGEL, there can be confusion in understanding the differences between a question set, a question bank and a question pool.

• Question Set is a group of questions “presented” together in ANGEL. For instance, if you have an illustration and then several questions that relate to that image, you’d want to present the questions together as a question set. By default, as you create an assessment, all questions are in a single question set.
• Question Bank is a collection of all questions available for use within a single course. Each course and LOR has its own question bank, but the questions can be accessed (added to an assessment) from the same screen.
• Question Pool is used when you wish to randomly select a given number of questions from an assessment out of a larger group of questions. That is, you may want to randomly display for each student 5 questions (in a quiz) out of 15 questions in a question pool.

ANGEL "Issues" (Bugs?)

Here are a couple “issues” we’ve reported to ANGEL Tech Support:

1. Tokens don't work in some areas of a course, while they do in others. For instance, they don't seem to work in Announcements, About This Section, on the Course Map, or within any feature that opens in a new window.
2. In the algorithmic question type in Assessments, ANGEL is calculating natural logarithms incorrectly. As near as we can tell, ANGEL is rounding the argument before calculating the natural log. This error appears to be happening with all three versions of logarithms (log, ln, and log10) supplied by ANGEL.
   
   For instance, Angel is saying that the answer to the natural logarithm of 1.49 is 0. The correct answer should be 0.39878. However, the natural logarithm of 1 is 0, which fits the hypothesis that ANGEL is rounding the argument (1.49 in this case, rounded down to 1) before calculating the logarithm.

When You Publish an Entire Folder from Your LOR

One of the advantages of using the ANGEL Learning Object Repository is the ability to publish an entire folder (assuming you’ve organized your folders course by course) to a source course or production course. However, when you do that, after you go to the target course into which you published, you’ll find a folder named after the LOR, such as “Repository – Personal: Jonathan Bacon.” That’s not an ideal name for a lesson with in a course. There is a way to easily delete that folder while leaving the files and subfolders within that folder intact. In essence, you delete the folder and it moves all the contents “up within the directory structure” of the course.

Before I tell you how this works keep in mind two concerns:

1. If you don’t understand files, folders and what a hierarchical directory structure is, this will mean nothing to you. If that’s the case, see your tech support for assistance.
2. This process is counter-intuitive to how file structures work in the rest of the computing world; that is, you need to realize there is danger in assuming this approach works when using the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Specifically, using this approach would normally delete all the contents of a folder including files and subfolders. This is a special function in ANGEL only.

With that as background, here’s how it works:

1. Open your LOR and select Publish to copy or link the folder with the desired content. You’ll identify the target course into which you want to publish during the process.
2. Go to the target course.
3. Select the Lessons tab and locate the folder you just published. The folder name will mirror the name of the LOR (such as “Repository – Personal: Jonathan Bacon”).
4. Roll over the folder name and select the Delete link (yes, you see this really is counter-intuitive).
5. When the new list of options appears, select Remove This Folder Only. Luckily it’s identified properly as the link to “Remove this folder and move its contents up.”
6. You’ll now see that the folder has been deleted and any subfolders within the original folder are now visible when you initially select the Lessons tab. All files in the original folder still remain.