ANGEL Glitches: Updates

Student Calendar Entries
Issue Reported to ANGEL Tech Support: When a student accesses the ANGEL Calendar and clicks on the Personal Entry link, there is no Add button available to add an entry.

ANGEL Response: I am able to duplicate this behavior both on your server and here. I will research as to why Add does not appear for students (and some other roles as well), and will let you know what I find out.

Meanwhile, anyone who does not have the Add link can still add an entry by clicking on the numeral of the date for which they want to make an entry. That brings up the same page as clicking on Add does.

Cannot Access Learning Object Repository after Course Copy
Issue Reported to ANGEL Tech Support: After a Copy Course Import of a course (Import Wizard > Course Copy), the option to Import from Learning Object Repository (Lessons > Add Content) was no longer available. This option was available in the source course but after the copy no longer shows up in the production course.

ANGEL Response: It looks like the instructor needs to give that course access to his LOR. To do so have the instructor login to his LOR (click Learning Object Repository button in left margin), click Manage > Course and Group Access >My Courses, then check the desired courses and click Add Selected. Then this LOR should show up as an available LOR for the course. When finished, click the Exit button (lower left corner). Please let me know if you need any more assistance with this issue.

Cannot Publish to ANGEL Using Respondus
Issue Reported to ANGEL Tech Support: We are not able to upload any assessments via Respondus 3.5.4 to the ANGEL production server (dl.jccc.edu) since late November 2008 or definitely since the December ANGEL update was installed in mid-December 2008. Several faculty and staff have tried to upload to the server and get error messages in the Respondus client. Here is a typical error message:

Creating Quiz... done.
Adding Questions... error.
Errors, unable to complete.

ANGEL Response: Waiting for a Reply.

Quiz Error Message Occurs When Submitting Answers
Issue Reported to ANGEL Tech Support: Upon submitting answers to the first Quiz question there is a large error message displayed (Error message omitted here for brevity).

ANGEL Response: This error will occur when attempting to grade an algorithmic question set to evaluate using Numeric (tolerance) if the values in the evaluation settings include more than four decimal places.

The evaluation line for question #1 reads:

Evaluate using Numeric (tolerance) [Answer] - 0.00001 <= [Answer] <= [Answer] + 0.00001

It appears as though these values are being converted to a notational format in the database, 1E-05, which cannot be used when evaluating the correctness of the student's response.
I have logged Issue #32368 regarding this problem. In the meantime, in order to avoid the error the instructor will need to change evaluation parameters to only include four decimal places, 0.0001 for instance.

ANGEL Issue Updates: December Release

We’re expecting a software release from ANGEL on Monday, December 15, 2008. The release includes two fixes that were requested by JCCC. As soon as the patch arrives, we’ll test and if possible install on production before the holiday break. Here are the details:

• Algorithmic Math Computation Error - In the algorithmic question type in Assessments, ANGEL is calculating natural logarithms incorrectly. As near as we can tell, ANGEL is rounding the argument before calculating the natural log. This error appears to be happening with all three versions of logarithms (log, ln, and log10) supplied by ANGEL.
  
  For instance, Angel is saying that the answer to the natural logarithm of 1.49 is 0. The correct answer should be 0.39878. However, the natural logarithm of 1 is 0, which fits the hypothesis that ANGEL is rounding the argument (1.49 in this case, rounded down to 1) before calculating the logarithm.
  
• LOR Folders: Can't Access Course Items When Linked From Inside Folder - When linking to a folder in a LOR, it seems to work okay until you try to view one of the items inside the folder, at which point you get an Access Denied error. Linking to a folder should work, as specified in the ANGEL documentation.
  
  Linking to the individual items in the LOR works, just not linking to the entire folder.

ANGEL "Issues" (Bugs?)

Here are a couple “issues” we’ve reported to ANGEL Tech Support:

1. Tokens don't work in some areas of a course, while they do in others. For instance, they don't seem to work in Announcements, About This Section, on the Course Map, or within any feature that opens in a new window.
2. In the algorithmic question type in Assessments, ANGEL is calculating natural logarithms incorrectly. As near as we can tell, ANGEL is rounding the argument before calculating the natural log. This error appears to be happening with all three versions of logarithms (log, ln, and log10) supplied by ANGEL.
   
   For instance, Angel is saying that the answer to the natural logarithm of 1.49 is 0. The correct answer should be 0.39878. However, the natural logarithm of 1 is 0, which fits the hypothesis that ANGEL is rounding the argument (1.49 in this case, rounded down to 1) before calculating the logarithm.