Bug Report: Personal & Team Calendar Entries Visible to All

The recent patch applied to the ANGEL server (July 2009 patch plus hotfix and security patch) has caused an issue with personal entries in the ANGEL Calendar. Personal entries created by an instructor are now visible to all students in that course. Students can also see all team entries, whether or not they are on the team for which the entry was intended. ANGEL is aware of the issue and is working on a fix; however, there is currently no workaround. We suggest that instructors remove all personal entries from their course calendars until this issue has been resolved.

Bits & Pieces of Tips

Let’s say you have a recurring entry in your ANGEL Calendar, such as the class time (every T/Th 2:00-3:00, for instance). Then you go into all those entries and add comments about what you will be covering on those days. Then you realize that class actually meets from 2:30-3:30. So you go into an entry and make the change, and then choose the radio button that applies changes to all occurrences. This does not just apply the changes you just made – it will change the entire entry to match. For instance, if you did this on a day where the topic was going to be “Getting to Know You Icebreaker,” then all of the Calendar entries in that series will now say “Getting to Know You Icebreaker” rather than listing the original topic.

If you have a Discussion forum and you create a Milestone set to Item Completion, it will be checked off for students even if they have not posted yet. Instructors should use Manually Marked to avoid this confusion.

The Assignment Tab for ANGEL Content Items

When creating a content item in ANGEL, the Assignment tab has two subsections. The first is for Milestone Settings, which is all about the Calendar and Tasks. When you create a milestone, you are essentially creating an entry in the student’s task list. You can choose either Manually Marked, which means the student will check off the box when they have completed the task, or Item Completion, which means that ANGEL will mark the check box when the student has completed the task. The task list can be viewed in the navigation panel on the left side of the screen. Whether or not the student uses this task list to track assignment is up to each student. In addition, under the Task Type, you can set Assign and Due dates which will automatically create entries in the ANGEL Calendar. These dates have nothing to do with when the content item is visible or when it is accessible to the student – the only place these dates show up is the Calendar.

The second section on the Assignment tab is the Gradebook Settings section. These settings are for linking the content item to the Gradebook. You can either create the assignment in this tab, or choose an existing assignment from the Gradebook. In the Calculation Type field, you need to be careful when choosing Manual. You would choose Manual if the assignment is one that ANGEL can’t grade, such as an essay. However, if the content item is a discussion forum, you don’t want to choose Manual or you would be unable to copy the grades to the Gradebook and would instead have to open the Gradebook and record them manually.

Disappearing Calendar Nugget?

The Calendar nugget does not appear on the Resources tab for students if there are no dates on the Calendar for the current week. So if you are conducting a scavenger hunt early in the semester to introduce your studnets to ANGEL (and the Calendar is one of the nuggets being sought), the Calendar must have at least one entry, such as a “Start of Class” date or a due date for the scavenger hunt…or it will not appear within the course.

Calendar & Date Manager Issues

We've had faculty members report some idiosyncrasies when manually adding Calendar dates.

For example, when you add an event to the ANGEL Calendar and then Edit that event, the year rolls back one year. Every time you go back in to edit that event, it rolls back another year. Workaround: manually change it back to the appropriate year.

Additionally, the year rolls back one instructor reported that when he tried to edit an event on March 31, 2009, the date changed to March 28, 2009. We verified this behavior in a second course.

We have had reports of disappearing dates from the Calendar but we suspect it's a mis-use of the Date Manager. When you manually add entries to your ANGEL Calendar, don’t use the Date Manager, go direct to the Calendar. The Date Manager is for changing dates associated with assignments (drop box) and assessments.