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.