When You Publish an Entire Folder from Your LOR

One of the advantages of using the ANGEL Learning Object Repository is the ability to publish an entire folder (assuming you’ve organized your folders course by course) to a source course or production course. However, when you do that, after you go to the target course into which you published, you’ll find a folder named after the LOR, such as “Repository – Personal: Jonathan Bacon.” That’s not an ideal name for a lesson with in a course. There is a way to easily delete that folder while leaving the files and subfolders within that folder intact. In essence, you delete the folder and it moves all the contents “up within the directory structure” of the course.

Before I tell you how this works keep in mind two concerns:

1. If you don’t understand files, folders and what a hierarchical directory structure is, this will mean nothing to you. If that’s the case, see your tech support for assistance.
2. This process is counter-intuitive to how file structures work in the rest of the computing world; that is, you need to realize there is danger in assuming this approach works when using the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Specifically, using this approach would normally delete all the contents of a folder including files and subfolders. This is a special function in ANGEL only.

With that as background, here’s how it works:

1. Open your LOR and select Publish to copy or link the folder with the desired content. You’ll identify the target course into which you want to publish during the process.
2. Go to the target course.
3. Select the Lessons tab and locate the folder you just published. The folder name will mirror the name of the LOR (such as “Repository – Personal: Jonathan Bacon”).
4. Roll over the folder name and select the Delete link (yes, you see this really is counter-intuitive).
5. When the new list of options appears, select Remove This Folder Only. Luckily it’s identified properly as the link to “Remove this folder and move its contents up.”
6. You’ll now see that the folder has been deleted and any subfolders within the original folder are now visible when you initially select the Lessons tab. All files in the original folder still remain.

LOR Linking Problem

We reported the following to ANGEL Technical Support:

"When you create a new folder from scratch in the Learning Object Repository (LOR) and then use Lessons > Add Content > File (or Page or Section Heading or Link), we found these results. The Section Headings failed to link at all (they did not appear in the linked folder), the (web) Link did appear and worked in the linked folder but the File or Page objects generated an "Access Denied" error. It does not seem to matter if the uploaded pages are HTML or PDFs or other file types.

"THIS IS THE SERIOUS ISSUE since faculty should be able to construct lessons/folders with content in the LOR and then successfully link to the folder, not just the individual items within the folder."

The reply from ANGEL:

"I apologize for the inconvenience and frustration that this has caused you and your users. I have verified that all of these linked LOR items were working in 7.3 July and they were broken with the 7.3 September update. I have entered this as an issue and it has been assigned #31081 for your tracking purposes.

"I have also gone ahead and escalated this to our Maintenance Planning Team (MPT) for consideration of a fix sooner rather than later because this is a core part of curriculum planning.

"I have discovered that you can work around this by expanding the folder and linking to the actual contents items instead of linking to the folder. You can then also move them into a folder inside the course and the links will still work. MPT usually meets on Monday. I will post the response back to this ticket as soon as I receive it.

"Thank you for bringing this to our attention."