Publishing from Respondus to Disabled Course

If an ANGEL course has been disabled (access limited to Editors only), it's also unavailable to Respondus. Respondus is a program that enables you to create an assessment off-line in Respondus and then publish the assessment to ANGEL. If you’re trying to upload an assessment and Respondus cannot see the course, you’ll need to enable the course using these steps:

1. Select Manage tab
2. Select General Course Settings
3. Select the Access tab
4. Set Member Access to All Members (if set to Editors Only, the course is disabled and will not appear in the Courses nugget, except on the Home page of Course Editors).
5. While on the screen, if the course is a source course, set the Search Engines radio button to No.
6. Click the Save button to save the new settings.

A trial version of Respondus is available at http://www.respondus.com/products/respondus.shtml

ANGEL’s Team Journal Feature

Do you want your students to participate in a team discussion in your online course? Perhaps you have a lot of students in your class, or you have merged two sections of your class, and you want smaller discussion groups. In ANGEL, you can do this without creating a separate discussion forum for each team.

First, you must create teams in your class. You can either have the teams randomly generated by ANGEL, or you can create teams and choose members manually. In this example, we will have ANGEL generate the teams.

To set up randomly generated teams, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Manage tab
2. Click on Teams
3. Click on Random Team Generator
4. Fill in the next screen based on your preferences
5. Click Next when all criteria have been set
6. Adjust team membership as desired, then click Generate Teams
7. Click Continue

Now that you have teams in your class, it’s time to set up a Team Discussion forum:

1. Go to your Lessons tab and click Add Content
2. Choose Discussion Forum
3. Fill out the criteria on the various tabs as usual, with the following exceptions
   a. On the Access tab, set the Team Access drop-down to Selected Teams
   b. Check the boxes for the teams you wish to have access to the forum
   c. On the Post Permissions tab, make sure Read, New Post, and Reply are checked only for the teams that will be using the forum
   d. On the Interaction tab, change Mode to Private Team Journal
4. When all the settings are the way you want them, click Save

As the instructor, you will be able to see posts from any or all of the teams by going to the forum and choosing which team you want to view (or choosing all teams) from a drop-down list at the top of the forum. Students will only be able to see posts and replies from other members of their team.

Thanks to Tracy Newman for writing up this tip.

Warning about Merged Course Rosters

If you’ve merged two or more sections of the same course, do not enable any of the original courses (whose rosters were merged). If you enable them, students will see the original courses (in their Courses nugget) in addition to the merged course. The end result is confusion for the student and the possibility that you may have student activity in both the original and the merged courses (which cannot be combined).

Confused? What to do to Start the Semester…

We push a lot of information to JCCC faculty so I tried to gather in one message, a checklist of issues for our faculty to tackle at the start of each semester. Here's the information we share (minus the intranet URLs that would not be accessible to non-JCCC folks anyway):

Do you need a checklist of tasks to complete to prepare for teaching or supplementing your face-to-face course with online materials in ANGEL? Use the following checklist to see if it helps.

1. If you’re teaching multiple sections of the same course and they have the same content, assignment due dates and so on, you may request that the course rosters be merged (the sections merged are treated as a single section and you load content once). Note: we do not enable our faculty to merge rosters, it's handled administratively by my office.
2. If you can’t see your courses on the Courses nugget in ANGEL, change the Courses nugget settings to show hidden courses. By default we hide all courses at JCCC (we create course shells for all sections of all classes and then disable them. Instructors who choose to use ANGEL must enable each section).
3. Update the Online Course Information Guide with details about your course. Note: we have a separate tool that is database driven and includes information on each course provided by the instructor. See http://web.jccc.edu/courseguide/list.asp.
4. Copy content from the source course to the desired production course. You should always build your course in a source course, not a production course.
5. Enable access to the course (that is; make the section visible to students in their Courses nugget). And...
6. Check Course Begins and Course Ends date settings to be sure they are accurate. By default, we allow student access on the first day of the semester (for Fall 2009 we set the Course Begins setting to August 17, 2009 at 12:00 AM and the Course Ends setting to December 30, 2009 at 11:55 PM).
7. Update the About This Section nugget to include information you want prospective and currently enrolled students to read about your course.
8. Update or adjust dates/milestones to make them applicable to the new semester. Check out the Manage tab and select the Date Manager link (Set Content Dates tab).
9. Update and/or upload your course syllabus.
10. Add your Ed Tech Center Designer to your courses (a Sr. Ed Tech Center Analyst is referred to as a Ed Tech Center Designer). If you don’t have an Ed Tech Center Designer, request one by contacting Jonathan Bacon at mailto:jbacon@jccc.edu (JCCC folks only).
11. Grant access to your personal LOR to specific other courses if you’ve granted access in previous semesters and your colleague plans to use the linked content in the new semester. If you need help with the process, contact your Ed Tech Center Designer.
12. If you want to grant students access to your course before the first date of the semester, change the Course Begins date setting to reflect the date you will grant access.
13. Have a wonderful semester!