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.

ANGEL Tip: Copying and Pasting Questions from Word into ANGEL

Do you have paper exams that you wrote in Word and you wish there was an easy way to get them into ANGEL? Well, there is!

The first step is to get your exam into the proper format. Make sure you don’t have any headers or other info in your exam (that is, in the Word document). Each question should begin with a number and a period, followed by the question text. Then each answer option should be on its own line and begin with a letter and a period. On the next line, you type “ANSWER:” followed by the correct answer. Then skip a line and begin the next question. For example:

1. What is a baby llama called?
A. kid
B. cria
C. calf
D. foal
ANSWER: B

Once you have your exam in this format, highlight the whole exam and copy it to your clipboard (right-click > Copy or CTRL-C). Log in to ANGEL and go to your course. Create an assessment and click on Add Question. Choose Copy and Paste Questions. Delete the default text (in the box at the top of the screen) and paste in your exam (right-click > Paste or CTRL-V). Change the number of points in the Default Settings to the desired number of points per question and then click OK.

If your exam was formatted correctly, you will see all the questions appear on your exam. If there were errors in your formatting, the process will fail and you will need to discover where the errors in your file are.

Note: You can also start each question in your Word file with a “Q:” rather than a number and a period, but this is not required. If your questions are numbered, don’t change them all to Q’s!

Just for emphasis, you can either begin each question with “Q:” or a number followed by a period, such as “1.” But, there’s no need to change it to a Q, but if you do please note that the Q needs to be followed by a colon rather than a period.

In most cases you’ll use the optional ANSWER and POINTS settings, the other optional settings are rarely used.

If you get an error message, the most common cause is extra spaces (such as putting two spaces between the letter of a choice and the text, such as “a. answer choice”) or an extra carriage return between questions (there should only be one blank line between the end of one question and the beginning of the next, and no blank lines between the question text and the answer choices for that question).

Just for clarity: Your questions can be in a Word or other text document and the text of each question should conform to the following specifications.

1. Each question should begin on a new line.
2. The first line of each question should start with 'Q:' or the question number followed by a period ('1.', 2.', '3.', etc.).
3. If the question has choices the choices should immediately follow the question text.
4. Each choice should be on a line by itself.
5. Each choice should begin with a choice letter followed by a period ('A.', 'B.', 'C.', etc.).

There are optional settings that may be added to add the number of points, include an image, or feedback. Fort details, check the iTeach Online ANGEL manual or check the online Help under assessments.

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.

Question Sets, Banks and Pools

Because of the terminology shift from Blackboard to ANGEL, there can be confusion in understanding the differences between a question set, a question bank and a question pool.

• Question Set is a group of questions “presented” together in ANGEL. For instance, if you have an illustration and then several questions that relate to that image, you’d want to present the questions together as a question set. By default, as you create an assessment, all questions are in a single question set.
• Question Bank is a collection of all questions available for use within a single course. Each course and LOR has its own question bank, but the questions can be accessed (added to an assessment) from the same screen.
• Question Pool is used when you wish to randomly select a given number of questions from an assessment out of a larger group of questions. That is, you may want to randomly display for each student 5 questions (in a quiz) out of 15 questions in a question pool.