Copyright: Off Air Recording

Johnson County Community College is phasing out VCRs on campus in favor of DVD players. Many faculty members have off-air recordings on video tape and have requested that the media be converted to digital video and burned to a DVD.

The college is unable to handle these requests based on the Kastenmeier Guidelines. For a history of the guidelines, see http://tinyurl.com/kastenmeier. The actual guidelines can be found at:

http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/MRC/Kastenmeier.html (UC Berkley web site) or http://www.wright.edu/ctl/downloads/KastenmeierGuidelines.pdf.

It’s important to note that these are guidelines established by a Congressional Subcommittee and do not carry the weight of law but are generally viewed as acceptable practice. The guidelines can be summarized as follows:

1. A broadcast program may be recorded off-air and retained by a nonprofit educational institution for up to forty-five (45) consecutive calendar days after which the recording must be erased or destroyed immediately. "Broadcast programs" are television programs transmitted by television stations for reception by the general public without charge.
2. An off-air recording may be used once by individual teachers for relevant teaching activities and repeated once only for instructional reinforcement, if needed, in classrooms and similar places devoted to instruction. The use must occur during the first ten (10) consecutive schools days within the forty-five (45) day calendar day retention period.
3. Off-air recordings may be made only at the request of and used by individual teachers, and may not be regularly recorded in anticipation of requests. No broadcast program may be recorded off-air more than once at the request of the same teacher, regardless of the number of times the program may be broadcast.
4. After the first ten (10) consecutive schools days, off-air recordings may be used (for the remainder of the forty-five calendar day retention period) only for teacher evaluation purposes. i.e., to determine whether or not to include the broadcast program in the teaching curriculum. During the remaining retention period, the broadcast may not be used for student exhibition or any other non-evaluation purpose without authorization.
5. The instructor may use just selected portions of an off-air recording, but the recorded programs may not be altered from their original content, or physically or electronically combined or merged to constitute teaching anthologies or compilations.
6. The off-air recording must include the copyright notice from the broadcast program as recorded.
7. Educational institutions are expected to establish appropriate control procedures to maintain the integrity of these guidelines.

As is always the case, the best approach is to use a legally obtained (purchased) copy of the broadcast (check with yuor college's Library Services to see if the broadcast is available or can be acquired through the Library) or seek permission from the copyright holder. An off air recording that has been retained beyond the 10 school day period is not considered a legal copy.

Turning Off Navigation in ANGEL?

Suppose you’re using SoftChalk to create modules for use in ANGEL and suppose you use the SoftChalk feature that automatically generates a table of contents (TOC). It can be confusing to students to have two navigation systems visible concurrently.

You can turn off ANGEL’s default navigation system using the Preferences feature in Lessons. The process is pretty straightforward.

1. Go to the Lessons tab.
2. Select the Preferences link and
3. Deselect the check boxes for the Navigation elements you do not want displayed.
4. Finally, click the Save button.

Thanks to Jeff Kosko for this information.

Question: ANGEL and Course Packs

I often hear the question from faculty: What warnings or concerns would you offer to faculty who are considering the use of a Publisher ePack or Course Pack? Here's a collection of responses from technical support staff who work with me at JCCC.

• Don’t unzip or install in a production course, instead use a source course. Often when unzipped, before you can trim out content you don’t want or need, the ePack will “make a mess of one's course.” Trim, delete, or eliminate what you don’t need (after importing into your source course) and then copy the pieces you want to the places in your course where you want the content.
• Many ePacks contain the same materials as appear in the textbook, you, as the instructor need to determine if that’s good reinforcement, superficial, or unnecessary. You may want to reference the materials in the textbook rather than have the textbook content be repeated in an online course, but that’s your call.
• Quiz questions in an ePack may be set up in units, with instructions for the first question applying to the entire set of questions, which means that the questions can't be rearranged without some revisions to the questions. Use question sets for these instances.
• You may find that some questions are not well-written and should be reviewed before being used in an exam. If you use a test bank, our suggestion is that you need to review all the questions and all content before use. Many JCCC faculty members handpick questions that are appropriate to their specific course objectives rather than using the test bank in its entirety.
• Be aware that some ePacks require the student to purchase an access code (either online or through the bookstore). If the ePack simply duplicates the textbook and requires the purchase of an access code, you may want to consider the added cost for your students. Further, access codes typically are good for one usage (one semester) and cannot be resold with the textbook. That may result in students buying used textbook without an access code and then the student cannot access the course materials. Once you use materials protected by an access code, you cannot legally or technically cease using the access code in subsequent semesters without stripping out all content from the ePack. If this occurs, you may find it easier to rebuild your course from scratch, rather than trying to strip out the ePack materials.

No Email Confirmation of Your Course Copy?

When you copy a course in ANGEL to another course shell, you see a message indicating that an email confirmation will be forthcoming. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen unless you set your email preferences to send email to an external mailbox. Here are the steps.

1. Select the Preferences icon (head silhouette icon on left).
2. Select System Settings.
3. Add your email address to the Forwarding Address field.
4. Change Forwarding Mode to “Forward My Mail and keep as New.”
5. Click the Save button.

Broken Links to a LOR?

We wish it didn’t happen, but there are times when the link between a Learning Object Repository (LOR) in ANGEL and a course breaks. When you notice broken links try reconnecting your LOR before you go item by item and recreate the links. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Go to your LOR.
2. Click Manage.
3. Click Course and Group Access.
4. On the right side of the screen, click My Courses.
5. Check the boxes for all of your current courses.
6. Click Add Selected.
7. Go back to your course and see if the links work.
8. Try to edit an assignment and see if that works.

Bad Idea: Changing an Assessment Password While a Test Is In Progress

Changing the password on an assessment while a student is currently taking the assessment will cancel the student's submission. Even if the submission makes it to the Pending list, all answers are not retained.

According to ANGEL support: “This doesn't seem to be a bug but more expected behavior. If the password is changed, then it would be as if the student had entered the wrong password and it wouldn't ‘authenticate’ (for lack of a better term). Making changes to an Assessment while it is in progress is not recommended.”

Here are the steps we used to confirm that this does happen:

1. Create an assessment and enter a password on the Access tab
2. Have a student go to the assessment, enter the password, and click the Begin button.
3. While the student is in progress, the Course Editor changes the password.
4. When the student finishes and clicks Submit, the password window appears.
5. The student enters the new password.
6. The student sees and clicks the Resume button.
7. All answers will be blank and the student must repeat the exam.

Definitions of JCCC Course Delivery Methods

At JCCC, the Distance Learning Advisory Council (DLAC) and the Instructional Deans Council (IDC) have been working on definitions to reflect the types of course delivery methods used at the college. In the future, these definitions will be reflected on our Credit Class Search page. The definitions approved by our Instructional Deans Council (IDC) appear below.

Face-to-Face Courses
Face-to-Face instruction takes place in a classroom as published in the JCCC Schedule of Classes. Based on JCCC’s Statement of General Education (http://www.jccc.edu/home/catalog.php/index/tocdegrees). students in all classes, including face-to-face classes, are expected to use technology appropriate to the course content and as needed to access web-based course materials. Face-to-face classes typically require access to computer equipment (either at home or in college labs provided for student use) and basic computing skills utilizing standard office, business and web browsing applications.

Hybrid Courses
Hybrid courses combine face-to-face classroom instruction and the convenience of online web-based learning, resulting in a reduction of the amount of time spent in the face-to-face classroom and a significant increase of time spent studying online materials. Students registered in hybrid courses must attend class meetings as listed in the JCCC Schedule of Classes.

Online Courses
Online courses use the Internet and a Learning Management System (ANGEL) to deliver course materials and to facilitate student-instructor, student-content, and student to student interaction. To participate in online courses, the student should have a good understanding of computer hardware and software applications and the Internet.

Self-Paced Courses
Self-paced courses are offered on a schedule of study that allows students to enroll in the course at any time during the semester. Course interaction is based upon a contract between student - instructor and in some cases can take up to one calendar year to complete. Some courses may use online delivery to facilitate the learning experience.

Media Courses (formerly telecourses)
Media courses deliver all or a portion of instruction through either cable broadcast or pre-recorded video lessons. The videos are available in DVD format from the Billington Library.

Students have access to these definitions at http://www.jccc.edu/home/depts.php/S00008/site/Courses.

Tip & Bug Report: Gradebook Setting

With our current version of ANGEL (7.3) there’s a Gradebook setting you don’t want to use. If you select Manage tab > Gradebook > Preferences, you’ll see the Show Grades for Dropped Students checkbox option. Don’t select it. This has always been the recommendation during iTeach Online training sessions (offered for JCCC fcaulty at the college). By default the setting is unchecked and there is no reason for faculty to ever check it because students who drop a course (in Banner--our system is integrated with our SIS) are automatically dropped from the course in ANGEL (so their grades won’t show no matter what you do). If the student is reinstated, all their work and grades reappear intact.

The bug is this: if you select the option, students who have not dropped will (randomly) disappear from your Gradebook. They’ll appear in the class Roster, just not in the Gradebook.

Moving Assessments from Blackboard to ANGEL

The current (April) issue of the Respondus newsletter includes an article on moving assessments from one LMS (such as Blackboard) to another (such as ANGEL). Check it out at: http://newsletter.respondus.com/april-2010/moving-assessments-between-lms/

Bloated PowerPoints Are Not “Green”

Uploading oversized PowerPoint slideshows require more time on the computer and requires more storage space (on the student’s computer as well as on the ANGEL server). Bloated PowerPoint slides also take longer to load for a presentation. How do you get bloated files? The easiest method is to simply drag graphic images onto a PowerPoint slide without resizing, trimming or compressing. With the Clean Out Your Office days just past, let’s not forget that every little “green” effort is magnified and can make a difference.

Here’s how you can encourage your students to create more efficient slideshows. The first step is simply to crop unnecessary parts of the images used in PowerPoint in order to further reduce the file size. That can be accomplished within PowerPoint itself (right-click the image, select Size and Position and on the Size tab, use the Crop settings to remove portions of the image from the left, right, top of bottom).

However, the most important step in PowerPoint (2002, XP, 2003 and 2007) is to use the built-in compression (of images) feature. To use it, complete these steps, which once you walk through it once, you’ll find are simpler than the number of steps would indicate):

1. Click on any picture in your presentation.


2. You will see the Picture Tools > Format options appear (upper left corner of PowerPoint 2007) as shown below.
   
   
   Click on the Compress Pictures icon shown above.


3. You will see the Compress Pictures Dialog box. To compress all pictures, leave the Apply to Selected Pictures Only check box unchecked.


4. You can also reduce the file size further by selecting the Options button, which displays the Compression Settings dialog box.
   
   Next your students would select the Print, Screen or E-mail option to reduce quality further (to match intended use).


5. When done with settings on the Compression Settings dialog box, click OK.


6. Next, click OK on the Compress Pictures dialog box.


7. Finally, use File > Save as..." to save your presentation with a new filename (if you want to retain the higher quality version) and add descriptive text such as "For Review" or "Compressed” to the end of the filename. The student should keep the original PowerPoint file, or at least the original images, in case they wish to edit the pictures again.
   I used this process to shrink a 1.09 MB file (had three images on three slides) down to 339 KB (images were compressed using the Screen option). Using the E-mail option would have reduced the file size further.

• There is an additional way or two to reduce the file size of a PowerPoint slideshow.
  
  If you have Microsoft Office installed, you’ll also have access to an application called Picture Manager, a handy tool for cropping, scaling and compressing images singly or in batches. The Picture Manager can be accessed from the Start Menu by selecting All Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Picture Manager. If students get their images to the sizes they actually need before inserting them into PowerPoint, the resulting presentation will be much smaller. Picture Manager comes with Office, so there’s no extra expense. Things like Google’s Picasa will do the same thing.


• If students are including videos, they should try to embed the video via YouTube, Vimeo or similar site, rather than insert the video.

Student Tracking Reports in ANGEL

If you want to use student tracking in ANGEL, turn it on before any student activity occurs. For JCCC's setup we've, by default, turned off tracking for each course, each semester. Tracking only begins to work after it is enabled. If tracking is turned on at some point after student activity begins, any reports will appear faulty for dates prior to the date and time when tracking was enabled.

By the way, you can turn on tracking at the folder level and that setting will cascade to all items within the folder. Turning on tracking for an entire folder of items is a lot easier than going to each individual item in the folder to enable tracking.

It’s also important to note that if a user exits ANGEL by closing their browser (as opposed to logging off using the ANGEL ‘Power’ button), ANGEL will not accurately record the tracking data for the student in that session.

ANGEL Tip: Copying and Pasting Questions from Word into ANGEL

Do you have paper exams that you wrote in Word and you wish there was an easy way to get them into ANGEL? Well, there is!

The first step is to get your exam into the proper format. Make sure you don’t have any headers or other info in your exam (that is, in the Word document). Each question should begin with a number and a period, followed by the question text. Then each answer option should be on its own line and begin with a letter and a period. On the next line, you type “ANSWER:” followed by the correct answer. Then skip a line and begin the next question. For example:

1. What is a baby llama called?
A. kid
B. cria
C. calf
D. foal
ANSWER: B

Once you have your exam in this format, highlight the whole exam and copy it to your clipboard (right-click > Copy or CTRL-C). Log in to ANGEL and go to your course. Create an assessment and click on Add Question. Choose Copy and Paste Questions. Delete the default text (in the box at the top of the screen) and paste in your exam (right-click > Paste or CTRL-V). Change the number of points in the Default Settings to the desired number of points per question and then click OK.

If your exam was formatted correctly, you will see all the questions appear on your exam. If there were errors in your formatting, the process will fail and you will need to discover where the errors in your file are.

Note: You can also start each question in your Word file with a “Q:” rather than a number and a period, but this is not required. If your questions are numbered, don’t change them all to Q’s!

Just for emphasis, you can either begin each question with “Q:” or a number followed by a period, such as “1.” But, there’s no need to change it to a Q, but if you do please note that the Q needs to be followed by a colon rather than a period.

In most cases you’ll use the optional ANSWER and POINTS settings, the other optional settings are rarely used.

If you get an error message, the most common cause is extra spaces (such as putting two spaces between the letter of a choice and the text, such as “a. answer choice”) or an extra carriage return between questions (there should only be one blank line between the end of one question and the beginning of the next, and no blank lines between the question text and the answer choices for that question).

Just for clarity: Your questions can be in a Word or other text document and the text of each question should conform to the following specifications.

1. Each question should begin on a new line.
2. The first line of each question should start with 'Q:' or the question number followed by a period ('1.', 2.', '3.', etc.).
3. If the question has choices the choices should immediately follow the question text.
4. Each choice should be on a line by itself.
5. Each choice should begin with a choice letter followed by a period ('A.', 'B.', 'C.', etc.).

There are optional settings that may be added to add the number of points, include an image, or feedback. Fort details, check the iTeach Online ANGEL manual or check the online Help under assessments.

ANGEL Tip – IMPORTANT! Do not use Copy Course mid-semester!

Your source course is a great place to develop your courses. You can experiment and rearrange and develop your course, and then use Copy Course to copy it into your production (live) course before the start of the semester.

Once the semester has begun, you want to work directly in the production course! If you add content to your source course and then use Copy Course to copy it to your production course, you will overwrite all student work and grades in your production course. To avoid this, work directly in your production course. If you have more than one section of your course, you can use Utilities > Export Item to copy an item to your other courses.

At the end of the semester, you can use Copy Course to copy your production course back into your source course so that it retains the most recent version of your course. You can then change dates and make any other updates you need for next semester, and then use Copy Course to copy it to your new production courses BEFORE the beginning of the semester.

ANGEL Tip – Copying Your Gradebook Settings

If you need to copy your Gradebook settings from one course or section to another, but you don’t want to copy the whole course, you can use a handy tool called the Copy Gradebook Settings tool.

Go to a course that does NOT already have your Gradebook set up. Click on the Manage tab and then on the Gradebook link. Then click on the Preferences link. At the top of this screen, there is a link to the Copy Gradebook Settings tool. Click on the link.

Be sure you are in a course that does NOT already have the settings you want! Note the warning text at the top of the screen: “This tool will erase current settings and replace them with settings from the selected course. Use with caution! There is no way to get back your settings after replacing them.”

From the drop-down menu, choose the course that has the Gradebook settings that you want. Select which items you want to copy (you probably want to select all of them). Click the Copy Settings button. That’s it – you’re done!

Thanks to Tracy Newman for writing up this tip.

ANGEL Tip: Students Not Seeing Their Grades

When students complain that they cannot see their grades in ANGEL, check the Release Date for all of your Categories in the Gradebook. The Release Date in the Gradebook is the date that you want the grades available to students. This automatically defaults to the day and time when you made the category so grades are immediately available. However, if you changed the date or were experimenting with settings, you may have changed this date accidentally.

To change the date so that students can see their grades, go to Manage > Gradebook > Categories. Select all of your categories using the checkboxes on the left. Click the Edit Selected button and check the box for Release Date. The date should then appear for the current day and time. Click Save. This will change the setting for all Categories at once, which you will be able to confirm by looking at the table of categories.

ANGEL Tip: Using Question Banks

Building a Question Bank is a great tool for creating better assessments for your courses. Think of a Question Bank as a place to store all of your questions from semester to semester. You can create your own questions, or you can upload test banks from your publisher. When creating assessments, you can then pick and choose which questions from your Question Bank you want to include on each assessment.

When creating a Question Bank that you are going to use from semester to semester, you will want to create this Question Bank in your Personal LOR. Every course you are teaching will have access to your LOR, so you will be able to use those questions in any course for any semester.

If you already have an extensive Question Bank in one of your production courses or your Source Course, you can copy the questions into your Question Bank in your LOR.

Note: Sometimes access to your LOR becomes disconnected for some or all of your courses. If this happens, you can reestablish communication between your courses and your LOR by going to the Manage tab in your LOR, clicking on Course and Group Access, clicking on My Courses, then checking the box for all of your courses and choosing the Add Selected button.

Thanks to Tracy Newman for the tip.

The Case of the Multiplying “About This Section” Nugget

We’ve had a couple cases where the About This Section nugget on the Course Home Page is duplicated and cannot be easily deleted. In working with ANGEL support, they’ve been able to cure the problem. We asked Angel support if there was any information we could forward to our faculty regarding the editing of the About This Section nugget so the duplication would not happen again. Here is what they shared:

“I'd encourage your faculty to only use the HTML toolbar to modify this area. I saw that there was some color that (had been) added and I couldn't locate a way to do that in the HTML toolbar. I believe this may have been the issue. If (course editors will) just use plain text they should be fine here.”

Serendipity: One Sentence Statement on Teaching

From the Professional & Organization Development Network in Higher Education [POD@LISTSERV.ND.EDU] distribution list: There are moments when serendipity reigns and you don't ask questions. This morning, getting myself deeper into the groove for the Lilly-South conference on teaching in higher education in Greensboro this weekend, sipping a cup of freshly brewed coffee, I opened my e-mail box. As I scrolled down and exercised my forefinger on the delete key, I came to a message. Its subject heading caught my eye, "Be Short." Intrigued, I opened it. It was from a university professor. She didn't tell me anything about herself. I'm not sure if the question she threw at me in her short message was hurled as a snide challenge or offered as a prayerful plea. Anyway, she tersely wrote, "I don't have time to read your lengthy epistles however I enjoy the very few I do copy and later read. I just want you to give me one sentence that sums up your attitude about teaching. That's all the time I have for." One sentence! A few words! A couple seconds read! Interesting.

Challenging! That beats in spades the five minute soliloquy my dear friend Todd Zakrajsek of my beloved UNC gives some of us at the Lilly-North conference. Well, to paraphrase the Bard, all things are ready if our hearts, soul, and mind be so. I guess mine had been readied for this as I've been reading myself mentally and spiritually to mix with and learn from some very neat people at the Lilly-South conference.

As it turned out, and here is where serendipity poked its nose into my affairs, before I had turned on my computer, before I had brewed a pot of coffee, I had, as I do every morning, blindly put my hand into my cat-in-the-hat hat and pulled out a word from the heap of what I call "resilient word for the day" that lay hidden at the bottom. Each morning, I go through this ritual to get the word that I plan and struggle to embody that day. Today, as serendipity would have it, the word I had selected was "amazed." Amazing!

Again, sometimes you just don't ask.

So, I read the message again, slowly; took another sip of coffee, slowly; looked at my word, slowly; and, my fingers started dancing on the keyboard, quickly: "Don't be afraid to be amazed by each student and don't be afraid to be amazing." One sentence. A reduction, as my son, Robby, the chef, would say, intensifying the flavor! How about that! I'll let her think about this one. I'll let me think about this one. Now, I'm off to live my own word all this weekend: to be fearlessly and unabashedly both amazed and amazing at Lilly-South.

Make it a good day.

Louis Schmier, Department of History, Valdosta State University, Valdosta, Georgia 31698, http://www.therandomthoughts.edublogs.org .

ANGEL Gradebook Tip: Points Versus Percentage

There is a lot of confusion about the ANGEL Gradebook modes called Points and Percentage. When you set up your grade book in ANGEL, you need to choose which grading scheme you will be using (Manage tab > Gradebook > Preferences > Gradebook Mode drop-down).

Points means that you assign a certain number of points to each activity in your class, then add up these points and divide by the total points possible to get each student’s final grade.

Percentage should actually be called weighted average. If you choose the Percentage mode, you assign a certain weight to each category of activities in your class, such as exams, homework, etc. When you do this, it does not matter how many points each activity is worth – the points in each category will be totaled and then weighted by the factor that you designate.

Note that even if you are using Points as your grading scheme, student grades can (and will) be expressed as a percentage. If a student gets 90 out of 100 on an exam, that’s still a 90% no matter which grading scheme you are using!

Thanks to Tracy Newman for the tip.

ANGEL Tip – Essay, Short Answer, and Fill in the Blank Questions

There are 10 different types of questions you can use in an ANGEL assessment, but three of these question types must be graded manually (that means you!) while the others are graded automatically in ANGEL. Of these three manually graded question types, the most commonly used are:

1. Short Answer
2. Essay

For these types of questions, the student must type an answer into a text field. After submitting the assessment, the rest of the questions will be graded, but any short answer and/or essay questions will be left ungraded until you go in and grade them. After you grade them, the score for the assessment will be totaled and entered into the grade book.

You can grade these types of questions by going to the assessment and clicking on the Utilities link. Then select Grade by Question . You will see a list of submissions and can click on each one to grade the questions. You can either leave student names hidden, or display student names to see whose answer you are grading.

Note: Fill in the Blank questions can be graded automatically by ANGEL! You can enter answer options that you will accept as correct, but you must be very careful that you type your options exactly. Be especially careful about spaces, capitalization, and punctuation. You can enter more than one option for each blank. For instance, if the answer is “dog” but you will also accept “canine” or “K-9”, you can enter each choice as a correct option for that blank.

Thanks to Tracy Newman, Sr. Ed. Tech. Center Analyst at JCCC for this tip.

ANGEL Tip: Dropping the Lowest Grade

In the ANGEL Grade Book if you choose to drop the lowest grade, by using the “Drop Lowest” option for a Category, you may still want to see which grade was dropped (the ANGEL Grade Book does not show which grade was dropped). However, you can go to reports and run a report on a given student and the dropped items will appear in gray.

You may also wonder if a category is set to drop the lowest grade and there is an “extra credit” item in the category, will the extra credit item get dropped if it is lowest scored item? Or what if the extra credit item is not completed by the student? You would not expect extra credit items to be dropped and that is how ANGEL behaves. The extra credit item is not dropped.

Use of Secure Browser in ANGEL

Some faculty when setting up assessments have selected the High - requires Secure ANGEL browser option when they establish Browser Security (You select the Settings link under the assessment name and then go to the Access tab). The Secure Browser setting means (for all practical purposes) the student must take the test in the JCCC Testing Center (that’s the only location on our campus where we’ve installed the Secure Browser). A better option is selecting None or Medium for Browser Security.

Cure for Slow Manage Tab

At JCCC, we were experiencing a significant slowdown when faculty used the ANGEL Manage tab (to access Roster, Grade Book and so on). We're running ANGEL 7.3. ANGEL has supplied a fix (December 2009) that we have not yet tested, but attributed the slowdown to the Course Theme Selector nugget on the Manage tab (which is available for each course). There is another link for the Course Theme Selector on the Manage tab in the Course Settings nugget that does the same thing. To avoid the slowdown we’ve removed the Course Theme Selector nugget on the Manage tab and to change the course theme, faculty would need to use the link under the Course Settings nugget.