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/

Publishing from Respondus to Disabled Course

If an ANGEL course has been disabled (access limited to Editors only), it's also unavailable to Respondus. Respondus is a program that enables you to create an assessment off-line in Respondus and then publish the assessment to ANGEL. If you’re trying to upload an assessment and Respondus cannot see the course, you’ll need to enable the course using these steps:

1. Select Manage tab
2. Select General Course Settings
3. Select the Access tab
4. Set Member Access to All Members (if set to Editors Only, the course is disabled and will not appear in the Courses nugget, except on the Home page of Course Editors).
5. While on the screen, if the course is a source course, set the Search Engines radio button to No.
6. Click the Save button to save the new settings.

A trial version of Respondus is available at http://www.respondus.com/products/respondus.shtml

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.

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.