What's New in ANGEL LMS 7.4
The ANGEL Learning Management Suite (LMS) 7.4 offers a host of new features designed to enrich the teaching and learning experience for faculty and staff, maximize an institution's investment in curriculum and better meet overall accountability needs, and expand and simplify administrative support. New functionality includes:
- Enhanced support for rich media content
- New lesson plans
- Enhanced surveys
- New grading rubrics
- New gradebook interface
- Learning object repository enhancements
- Assessment updates
- Better support for consortia
- Enhanced content exchange
- Evergreen Training
- Change management and services support
As always, the ANGEL user community was heavily involved in the design of new and updated program elements, a hallmark of the ANGEL Learning development process.
Enhanced Support for Rich Media Content
The ANGEL LMS 7.4 provides new tools to integrate web-based rich media content giving instructors new ways to create more engaging and interactive teaching and learning experiences.
- HTML Editor Google tools – easily add YouTube videos, Picasa pictures, and other Web 2.0 content anywhere the HTML Editor is available. These areas include discussions, page contents, and assessments.
- Mashup Nugget – add Web 2.0 content to any portal page via a new Mashup Nugget.
- Course RSS Nugget – integrate RSS feeds into courses as well as portal pages. The enhanced RSS Nugget comes with a predefined list of RSS feeds.
New Mashups to the ANGEL LMS provide easier access to Web 2.0 content.
New Lesson Plans
A new lesson plan content item allows instructors and/or instructional designers to create a template-based lesson plan and then search and align to standards all required instructor or student content resources in support of the plan. The result is a self-contained, easily distributed and shared content item that contains both the lesson plan and the supporting content. The ANGEL LMS 7.4 ships with common lesson plan templates as well as a blank template that allows an institution to create and distribute a customized template.
Enhanced Surveys
The ANGEL LMS 7.4 enhances surveys and aligns them more closely with the overall capabilities of assessments. The enhancements make surveys a more effective tool for pre- and post-assessment of courses, instructors, and programs. Enhancements include:-
Survey questions banks – you can now create and reuse survey questions for individual courses or repositories. Search and browse options make adding stored questions to surveys easier.
- New Likert scale question type – use Likert scale questions one at a time or create a grid of questions that all share the same Likert scale.
- Survey analysis – completed survey submissions are stored for automated, detailed item analysis reporting. The standard survey report includes mean, standard deviation, standard error, confidence interval, and response distribution. Survey data can be printed or exported for further analysis and/or storage.
New Grading Rubrics
The ANGEL LMS 7.4 now offers grading rubrics to assist in the evaluation of manually graded assignments. Grading rubrics simplify the process of grading manually graded items and assure that students are evaluated against the same criteria by the same or multiple graders. Students also benefit in that they can see, in advance, the criteria against which their assignment will be evaluated. Rubrics further strengthen the ANGEL LMS’ support for a learning outcomes approach. By aligning rubrics to standards and/or objectives, institutions can measure student progress against goals.
Score a student’s work by simply clicking in the cell that corresponds to their level of achievement.
New Gradebook Interface
The ANGEL LMS 7.4 offers a new optional Gradebook that provides additional tools and a host of usability and workflow improvements. Improvements include:
- Flexible terms – new term definition and reporting tools allow the ANGEL LMS to support any term / reporting period configuration desired.
- Improved setup – a new “Setup Tasks” section notes instructor progress throughout the setup process, allowing the instructor to jump in and out of the setup process at any point.
- Single interface – all grading tasks are now surfaced in one area in the Gradebook. Any ungraded items are shown here as are common course-end tools.
- Reporting summary – all Gradebook related reports are summarized and accessible via the new Gradebook Menu.
Learning Object Repository Enhancements
The ANGEL LMS provides the most comprehensive set of content management capabilities available. Changes to the learning object repository (LOR) in the ANGEL LMS 7.4 improve centralized content management workflow; make it easier to create and share content items, publish assessments and surveys across multiple courses; and improve reporting of student results at both course and aggregate levels.
New Content Items
Institutions can develop and share rubrics and lesson plans within or across departments, reducing re-work. Survey question banks make it easy to create and reuse survey questions for individual courses or repositories. New questions created in surveys are stored in the question bank by default. Search and browse options make adding these stored questions to surveys easier.
Improved Search
Improved searching in the LOR makes it easier to import course content from a repository or another course. Instructors can browse or search by keyword or standard to locate content, then point to or create a destination for the content before copying or linking to it.
More Flexible Scoring
The ANGEL LMS 7.4 provides greater flexibility to curriculum designers in terms of how they distribute and report against student assessment. Student submission data can be associated with the course, the LOR, or both.
Assessment Updates
The ANGEL LMS 7.4 provides a number of updates to question sets and item analysis, providing enhanced capabilities and more robust analysis of assessment items.
- Simple “pseudo-Question Pools” – instructors can set a maximum number of questions to display in a particular question set, thus allowing a question set to function as a static question pool.
- Improved item analysis – item analysis is now available for individual question pool and manually graded questions.
- Regrade – the regrade option can now be used on individual Question Pool questions.
- New statistics – standard deviation and standard error are now included in item analysis along with reliability, mean, difficulty, discrimination and the frequency and distribution of answer responses.
Better Support for Consortia
Each learning enterprise has its own structure and unique needs, and the ANGEL LMS 7.4 provides additional flexibility to those who must support the LMS within the overall technology structure.
New Institutional Directory
With the ANGEL LMS 7.4, consortia or institutions with multiple locations can better manage the ANGEL LMS across the enterprise. Enhancements include:
- Institutional directory – an institution can use one instance of the ANGEL LMS for multiple schools or campuses managed from a central location. You can add additional domains / directory entries at any time.
- Segmentation by organizational unit – an institution can completely segment users, courses, groups, and repositories by organizational unit, thus helping maintain data integrity and control of reporting access.
- Enhanced privacy – the ANGEL LMS 7.4’s new partitioning tools address privacy concerns by not allowing students from different organizational units to see students in other units.
New Institutional System Rights / Roles
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With the ANGEL LMS 7.4, institutions can create or modify roles using any set of system level rights. This provides an institution ultimate flexibility in how they define system roles or distribute administrative management of the ANGEL LMS. The institution can define as many or as few roles as needed, allowing system administrators to delegate authority as needed.
Enhanced Content Exchange
The ANGEL LMS accepts a wide variety of open and proprietary content types. This flexibility eases migration from other products to ANGEL. The ANGEL LMS 7.4 is the first learning management system to enable export to the Common Cartridge format, providing institutions or instructors greater ability to move content to other products that support the format.
ANGEL LMS 7.4's new Content Exchange also provides greater control over content management tasks. Course migrations, which typically put a burden on the system, are moved out of the web application process. This allows system administrators to queue course migration agents to multiple servers and off-peak hours.
Institutions can also protect their investment in content by creating course backups automatically on a scheduled basis. Backups can be scheduled during non-peak hours or by organizational unit, allowing back up of an entire institution over a period of days or weeks, rather than trying to complete a full backup at one time.
Evergreen Training
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Change Management and Services Support
To provide a highly satisfying user experience and enable the ANGEL community to quickly take advantage of the ANGEL LMS 7.4 features, ANGEL Learning has updated and improved documentation, tutorials, and support services.
Online Documentation and Tutorials
The ANGEL LMS 7.4 includes updated online documentation as well as expanded tutorials, including a new Instructor Quickstart Tutorial that includes embedded step by step video tutorials and updated and expanded ANGEL Instructor Step by Steps.
IT System Services
ANGEL Learning’s IT System Services can provide self-hosted sites a range of services to help an institution install, configure, and manage its ANGEL LMS installation. These services are designed to help a new community member get up and running with their new ANGEL LMS implementation.
Application Services
ANGEL Learning’s Application Services can help any site manage their ANGEL implementation with ongoing ANGEL expertise. ANGEL Learning’s experienced services team can help your organization apply best practices and expand the use of your ANGEL LMS implementation.
