IT Development and Applications just shared this announcement that ANGEL will be down on June 1 and 2 for the upgrade to v. 7.4:
The ANGEL Learning Management System will be unavailable between Tuesday, June 1 at 7:00am and Wednesday, June 2 at 4:30pm. The downtime is necessary to install a new version of ANGEL – 7.4. *Please note that all existing course content (including content rolled over from previous courses) will be automatically migrated to ANGEL 7.4. *
In version 7.4, creating and evaluating assessments have been improved with the addition of Grading Rubrics and an enhanced Gradebook. The Learning Object Repositories (LORs) have been enhanced; there is now support for rich media content in discussion forums, pages, and assessments.
*Grading rubrics* provide instructors and other assessment evaluators with an efficient method of consistently grading subjective learner submissions for drop boxes and manually-graded assessment questions. Grading rubrics can be created individually for ANGEL courses, or copied or linked into ANGEL courses from Learning Object Repositories (LORs). Students also benefit from the use of grading rubrics in that they can see, in advance, the criteria against which their assignment will be evaluated.
The *Gradebook* has a more intuitive and user-friendly interface. Among the new features available are: Grade Reports, Grade Entry Grid, Submissions Manager, and an Ungraded Items nugget.
- The *Grade Reports* allows you to generate grade reports based on various parameters such as categories and dates. Each report can be saved and accessed from the Reports nugget in the gradebook.
- The *Grade Entry Grid *makes it easier to enter and edit grades by directly typing them into the Grade Entry Grid.
- The* Submissions Manager* provides an interface in which you can enter a grade for each assignment directly from the gradebook. Additionally, instructors can view assignments that have ungraded submissions associated with them.
- The *Ungraded Items nugget* conditionally displays assignments that require manual grading.
The *Learning Object Repositories* (LORs) incorporates the ability to aggregate user data from several courses. For example, an assessment can be deployed across multiple sections of the same course with combined submission information stored in the LOR.
The HTML editor in discussions, pages, and assessments provides tools to integrate web-based *rich media support* such as YouTube videos, Picasa images, and other Web 2.0 content.
The Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence will offer an ANGEL 7.4 Enhancements workshop on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 from 10:00am-12:00pm to highlight the new features. Please register online at: http://www.scranton.edu/ctleregistration
