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.

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.

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/

HOW TO VIEW ASSESSMENT ANSWERS & ITEM ANALYSIS: CORRECTION

Correction: While the steps indicated in yesterday’s message cover the Item Analysis feature, they do not address how you would view an individual student's answers. To do this:

1. Go to Utilities for that assessment.


2. Select View, Grade or Delete Submissions.


3. Next to a student's name, click either View or Grade, depending on whether you just want to see their answers or if you want to grade the assessment.


4. And that’s it!

If you want to see the Item Analysis for the assessment, use the following steps (the same steps listed in yesterday’s newsletter).

1. Go to the item (Assessment) on the Lessons tab.


2. As you mouse over the item, links appear below the item (Settings, Reports, Utilities, Delete).


3. Click on the Reports link and you will see the following options:
   
   Activity Summary: Displays the number of times each user has accessed this item
   Activity Detail: Displays the complete activity log for this item
   Item Analysis: Shows a summary of responses by question
   


4. Select Item Analysis and you will be able to review the answers students gave to each question.

Assessment Mis-Behavior

You will find that when you go to take an assessment in ANGEL it will start you at the bottom of the assessment. You will get the last question and any before it that fit on the screen and not the first question with any following that show, like you would expect.

This is causing some students to panic because they don’t realize they must scroll to the top of the screen to get the beginning of their assessment and they think they are missing questions.

This refers to ANGEL version 7.3 with all patches installed up to and including June 30, 2009.

Finding a Pending Assessment

Faculty members have reported a few instances where students submitted assessments and receive an error message. Later, the instructor finds no record of that submission existing anywhere. In one instance, this occurred because the end time for the exam was reached while the student was still working on the exam (i.e., the student had an hour to complete the exam, but started 30 minutes before the exam was set to be disabled – the student took 45 minutes, hit submit, got an error message, and poof!).

In another case, a student hit the Backspace key while writing an essay, and ANGEL interpreted the keystroke the same as clicking the Back button in the browser (this is a common way in which a browser interprets pressing Backspace). When my staff tested using the Backspace key, they were able to get back into the exam and continue, but the student apparently could not, and her submission was nowhere.

Note: You may want to warn your students about using the Backspace key during an assessment or composing a submission online.

Anyway, we’ve found that under the Utilities link for each exam, there is a Pending link. Submissions that were interrupted by pressing the Backspace key or by an error (when submitting) will be found under the Pending link. You can view, delete, or submit any of the pending submissions. Our experience is that these pending submissions were not complete, so we suspect that answers are only retained until the error occurred.

Clarification – if you use the Backspace key during an assessment while writing an essay or short answer (anything in a text box), nothing bad happens. It only acts as a Back button if you are not within a text entry field. Even on an assessment, you can go back in and finish if the time has not expired. All answers seem to be retained until the interruption occurs.

Respondus Workaround

ANGEL tech support has verified that Respondus does not publish to ANGEL on our server, but it does publish successfully on their servers (both version 7.3 before and after the December update). So we’re now looking at specific settings on our servers that might be precluding the operation. In the meantime, JCCC faculty member Susan Brown has shared a work-around that everyone can use to get your assessments out of Respondus and into ANGEL. Please review the following:

To import Respondus quizzes as a ZIP file into ANGEL:

1. In Respondus set or change the Personality to IMS QTI 1.1+
2. If the Quiz you are working with was made in another Personality, it will ask you if you want to convert the File, click OK.
3. Choose Save as a new file.
4. Click on the Preview and Publish tab, then the Save QTI XML button on the left side menu. Make sure the following two default preferences are checked:
   Points as percentage 1-100%
   QTI XML zip file using IMS Content Packaging 1.3.
5. Click the Save as button and save the ZIP file to any location on your local machine.
6. Log into your ANGEL® 7.3 course and click the Manage tab. The Management Console page appears.
7. Click the Import Wizard hyperlink (located in the right column). The Content Import Wizard menu appears.
8. Click the Content Package hyperlink. The Content Package Upload page appears.
9. Click the Browse button. A Choose file dialog box appears on the screen.
10. Locate and select the Zip file and click the Open button.
11. Click the Upload File button once. An Upload Successful message appears when the upload process is complete.
12. Click the OK button to continue. The next screen allows you to select where you want the items added to your course or group, such as Top-Level, New Folder, or Existing Folder.
13. Be sure to check the box that says Migrate Quizzes to Assessments.
14. Once you have selected where you want the item, click the OK button.
15. Click Cancel when it asks if you want a backup made before migrating Quizzes to Assessments.
16. When the import process is complete, click OK.
17. You will need to rename the assessment as they all will be named EXAM 1 by default.

Regarding Assessments, Did You Know?

Deleting a Question
If you delete a question from a question bank, that question will still exist in any assessments in which it has been used. If you then go and delete the question in all assessments within the course, the question will still exist if any student has taken any of the assessments in which the question appeared.

Importing Questions
If a publisher provides an assessment question bank for use in your course(s),

1. First, request the question bank in common cartridge format (ANGEL supports),
2. If not available, request in ANGEL format,
3. If not available, request in Blackboard format.

Re-grading Questions
You have three options:

1. Change the point value,
2. Drop the question entirely,
3. Give full credit.

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.

ANGEL Tip: More Working Space in the HTML Editor

When editing assessment questions and answers, if the HTML Editor is enabled, the text window (where you enter numbers and text) may seem to disappear or its size is too small to be functional. As you can see on the following screen capture, the answer boxes may be so small that the HTML Editor toolbar occupies all the space and the area for editing text disappears.
If this occurs, you have two choices: you can click the little triangle on the left (to close the toolbar…which may not be the desired option) or you can open the HTML Editor in a free-floating window (see the icon identified below).

Thanks to Davy Jones for this information.