ANGEL TIP: USING THE COURSE ANNOUNCEMENTS TOOL EFFECTIVELY

The Course Announcements nugget is a common place many instructors use to communicate important information to their students. Do realize, however, that whatever you put in this nugget is also visible on the Personal Home Page (the page you see after logging in to ANGEL but before you select a class) in the My Announcements nugget.

This functionality can be helpful if you have information you want students to see even before they log into your class. However, you should be aware that if you include some kind of formatted content, like a large image or a table, your announcement could affect the appearance of the Personal Home Page for all of your students. If you include something (like an image or a table) that cannot collapse to a smaller width, it will cause the whole column that includes the My Announcements nugget to remain at that width. This causes the other columns to shrink to smaller widths, which can make it difficult for students to locate their courses or read other content.

If you want to make an announcement in your course that does not appear on the Personal Home Page, you can consider using the Course News nugget rather than the Course Announcements nugget.

Thanks to Tracy Newman for sharing this tip.

Announcements Everywhere

Announcements come in two varieties: course specific and institutional. You, the instructor, send out the course specific announcements while institutional announcements deal with scheduled server outages or other system-wide issues. Students and faculty can add or delete the My Announcements nugget from their Personal Home Page. That nugget includes both types of announcements.

Within the course, the instructor can include a Course Announcements nugget. It will include only the announcements that the instructor issues. As previously stated, these announcements will also appear in the My Announcements nugget on the Personal Home Page, mixed in with announcements from all other courses in which the student or instructor is enrolled and with the institutional announcements. If you want to create announcements that are not listed on the Personal Home Page, use the Course News nugget within your course.

If you or your students delete the My Announcements nugget from their Personal Home Page, the log-in page for ANGEL still includes the Public Announcements nugget which displays institutional announcements.