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.