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 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.

Updated Information on Copying Course Content

We’re learning as we go. Contrary to our previous understanding, you can use the Manage > Import Wizard > Copy Course command to copy content from a source course into a production course even after students have been added to the course but not after the course opens and there’s student activity. Here’s an update:

• The Copy Course function copies content into the target course but leaves students enrolled.
• If you have student activity such as email and tracking information (such as the number of log-in sessions), that information is not overwritten by the Copy Course.
• If students have taken assessments or submitted assignments, that information is overwritten.

In summary, use the Copy Course feature before the course is opened up to students (typically, first day of classes) but not on or after that date.