On May 14, Information Technology Services upgraded Penn State's Course Management System, A New Global Environment for Learning (ANGEL), to version 6.2. Among the enhancements are improvements to ANGEL's quizzing and team functions.
ANGEL allows instructors to efficiently perform administrative and pedagogical tasks such as posting a syllabus, adding course files, establishing threaded discussions, administering quizzes, collecting assignments and managing grades from one online location without the need to know HTML. The new features and updates that ANGEL Learning, Inc., the developer of ANGEL, made to the new ANGEL version are not far-reaching, however they do enhance ANGEL's ability to give faculty more flexibility and streamline administrative tasks. Therefore, users of the previous ANGEL version, 6.0, should find version 6.2 easy to learn.
Among ANGEL 6.2's enhancements are new quizzing tool features designed to add more flexibility and depth to the quiz tool. These include enhanced quiz settings to allow for greater customization so faculty can produce quizzes that better match course goals and teaching styles. There are also two new quiz question types: ordering, which requires students to rearrange a list of answer choices in the proper order to match the questions, and true matching, where answer choices in one list must match questions in another list. Faculty can have even greater quiz customization now that the HTML editor is available for individual answer items. This enables course editors to enhance text question options and to insert tables and images for specific answer options.
Other new quiz tool features include the ability to grade quiz submissions by question. This feature allows for blind scoring of ungraded responses, and grading is done one question at a time, moving through all ungraded responses before moving to the next question. Another feature is automatic grade recalculation for prior quiz submissions for faculty who need to change the answer or point value of a quiz question. This means that a faculty member no longer needs to go in and change the grade of each student who has taken the quiz prior to the answer key being altered, saving a lot of time and effort.
Along with the quiz tool, the updates to ANGEL's team functions enable faculty to easily manage teams within their classes. For example, there is now an "Unassigned Users" link that allows course editors to quickly determine which students have not yet been assigned to teams. To help course editors manage courses with a high number of teams, a Random Team Generator randomly creates teams and sub-teams based on criteria assigned by the course editor. Also, the "Rebalance Generated Teams" feature provides course editors with the option of moving students to other teams or adding new students to existing teams.
The new features added are designed with the users' needs in mind. "ANGEL is part of Penn State's desire to keep our faculty on the leading edge of technology innovation," said Brett Bixler, lead instructional designer and member of the ANGEL support team. "Many of the improvements are based on customer requests for new features or improvements to the existing features."
Faculty who are not familiar with ANGEL or who would like to better utilize this learning tool can register for ANGEL seminars at http://its.psu.edu/training/. The courses range from a basic overview for beginners to seminars that cover how to get the most out of specific ANGEL features such as quizzing and lesson planning tools.