Giving Students Early Course Access

At JCCC faculty can grant students access to one of your courses (using ANGEL) earlier than the first day of class (for Spring taht date is January 20, 2010), here are the steps to change the availability date. The same steps apply if you want to extend student access to a course beyond the default closing date, which at Johnson County Community College (JCCC) is two weeks after the end of finals (i.e., June 4, 2010):

1. Log into ANGEL and access the specific course.
2. Select the Manage tab.
3. In the Course Settings nugget, select the General Course Settings link.
4. Scroll down and make the required changes to the Course Begins date and time settings and Course Ends date and time settings.
5. Be sure the check boxes in front of the two settings are selected.
6. Click the Save button at the bottom of the screen.

It’s important to note that by default, the Course Begins date at JCCC is always set to the first day of the class and the Course Ends date is always set by default to two weeks after the class ends.

Not Moving to ANGEL 7.4

Just prior to the Thanksgiving Break, the Educational Technology Center staff at JCCC completed the first round of tests of ANGEL 7.4 (originally scheduled to be installed over the upcoming semester break and ready for production/faculty use in January 2010). Based on that testing, we recommended to JCCC's ANGEL Implementation Team (and notified our Distance Learning Advisory Council) that sufficient time was not available prior to the planned upgrade to complete testing, explore new features and resolve a number of issues encountered (e.g., the new Gradebook functionality, exception errors encountered and more). As a result, the Implementation Team has decided to postpone the ANGEL 7.4 upgrade until at least summer 2010.

We’ll be testing additional 7.3 patches available for ANGEL in a pre-production environment and will install the new 7.3 patches at an appropriate time this spring.

Our Testing Results
For the record, during our initial testing we encountered multiple problems and felt we could not work through these issues in time for a January update. All of the following were reported to Blackboard/ANGEL and in some cases they responded with potential fixes, that we do not have time to implement or test. Here’s a quick cut and paste of the issues we did encounter.

1. We tried to create a new course similar to a source course in ANGEL and for some system editors, did not allow the user to add the course title, received an error message.
2. We tried to view the course preview and setting for the 7.4 courses. longer have the edit pencil in 7.4 or could not preview the course without an error.
3. When a course includes a quiz (even though we never used Quizes, just assessments, many epacks come with quizzes to amke them compatible with 7.2) when the course opens there is a pop up that asks if you want to convert all of your quizzes to assessments. If you click "no" it keeps popping up. If you click "yes" you get an error page. It did not actually convert anything and the pop up continues to appear no matter what one does. Note: This pop up only occurs if you have an old format quiz in the course.
4. You cannot create a Grading Scale in the Gradebook. Go to Gradebook click on Grading Scale try to enter a grade letter and a number and click on new Item. Nothing happens and it is not added.
5. When attempting to enter certain courses (clicking the course name in the course list) an error message appears in a new tab. It is possible to enter the course and the course seems to run fine except for the error message re-appearing when you click on the "Course" tab.
6. The Grade Entry Grid does not load. There is a message that says "There is no grading scale defined for this course. You may see incomplete grade data until a complete grading scale is created."
7. When you go to Manage Tab>Grade Reports and click Rearrange, you get a server application error (but you can go to the Reports Tab and see My Gradebook)
8. When using the “Ungraded Items” in the Tasks List, on the Course Guide, a tester reported that when she clicked on the Mid-Term (an assessment in ANGEL with just 4 questions), you get some of those questions repeated in the ungraded list.
9. You get an error when you try to Publish Grades: “There are no allowable grade values defined by the administrator. . .” There are grades present, though because the Submission Manager appears to work correctly, showing you the grades and comments that have already been entered. You can also grade assignments by going to the assignment and clicking on Submissions
10. Add Item button does nothing. Browser reports a JavaScript error: "Angel is not defined","https://owa.jccc.edu/owa/redir.aspx?C=d3bce8fd830f4801ba4cfed8094794bc&URL=https%3a%2f%2fangeltest.jccc.edu%2fsection%2fGB%2fCategories%2fDefault-min-Loc-en-US.js","Line: 19". That line reads: "{Angel.API.Ajax.Gradebook.SaveCategories(json,strPropertyList,objGrid.SaveDataSuccess,objGrid.SaveDataFailure,objGrid);}"
11. On the 7.4 pre-prod server, when copying a course over another course, not a blank shell, the copy process took exceedingly long (30 Minutes). Also the new homepage fro the target course, did not match the original course home page format/arrangement, that is, some elements were present but not in the original locations, and the theme was not copied over.

Just for what it’s worth.