ANGEL® at
University of Waterloo
7601 Interactive Way, Suite 100
Indianapolis, IN 46278-0435
www.angellearning.com
Copyright 2006 ANGEL Learning, Inc.
Last Update for Version # – November 2011
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Table of Contents
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Background
Organizations at University of Waterloo
How do these organizations work together, integrate, etc.
The primary support organizations for ANGEL at UWaterloo are Information Systems
and Technology groups: Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services (ITMS),
Computer Systems and Services (CSS); Distance Education in Distance and
Continuing Education; Blended Learning in Centre for Teaching Excellence; Library.
UWaterloo has locally branded our ANGEL instance as UW-ACE (University of Waterloo
ANGEL Course Environment), which can be found: http://uwace.uwaterloo.ca.
UW-ACE Operations Group
UW-ACE Ops includes members from all of the above groups. It focuses on the
operational issues in support of the UW ANGEL installation, UW-ACE. Issues include
day to day support, policies regarding its use, and plans for the ANGEL software
evolution. It is a "feeder" group to the campus Instructional Technologies Advisory
Committee (ITAC), communicating to and getting feedback from that group's broad
campus membership. UW-ACE Ops also brings forward for approval significant issues
and recommendations to the University Committee on Information Systems and
Technologies (UCIST).UW-ACE Ops meets about once per month.
See more at http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~chappell/projects/angel/operations_group/.
Centre for Teaching Excellence
Description of group/purpose
Team Members/Roles
Workflow with ANGEL
Primary users? Primary Function? Etc.?
(Repeat for all teams)
Distance and Continuing Education (DCE)
Description of group/purpose
The Distance Education unit is located off-campus and is responsible for creating and
maintaining the full course life-cycle for a suite of ~ 250 online credit courses. We
currently offer a mix of completely online courses, and converted “traditional” audio
courses – these audio courses are actively being both phased out and replaced with
fully-developed online instances. All of our courses have some presence in UW-ACE.
DCE works with instructors to design pedagogically-informed courses that are
customized for the instructor, but follow a standard template / framework which is
managed by the office.
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The Continuing Education unit offers non-credit courses, and has recently begun to
develop online courses that are offered currently through UW-ACE. Currently, our CE
course creation process is managed very similar to our DE process.
Team Members/Roles
Teams:
Web Development (10 staff), WebDev is comprised of a mix of project managers,
instructional designers (Online Learning Consultants) and content creation experts, and
work closely with instructors and departments to design and implement full online credit
and non-credit courses.
Quality Assurance (5 Staff), QA works with WebDev and Instructors / authors to
ensure DCE courses are free of errors including copyright, spelling, system settings, and
are responsible for the term-to-term monitoring and release of course offerings
Information Systems (3),IS provides technical support for students, instructors and
DCE staff
Assignments and Exams, Duplication & Distribution, Information/Student Services
(7 staff), These 3 units work indirectly with ANGEL, but directly support our course
offering model through support services, assignment and materials management, and
exam scheduling/management.
Workflow with ANGEL
Departments approach DCE with a request to build a course, which is then discussed
and design in WebDev with an OLC to meet learning objectives. The content is then
designed / arranged to work within DCE’s ANGEL course template.
The template is a mix of several global and local custom CSS and javascript files, with
some central content pulled from a LOR. The template is also comprised of DCE best-
practices based on experience maintain and supporting courses in ANGEL – Tab
Settings, ENV_VARs, nugget placement, naming and defaults are set as part of the
template.
Each term every course is QA’d before copying from our “Master” courses into the Term
of offer. Some courses require CD’s to be shipped, which involve repurposing content
that is in ANGEL into CD – friendly format.
Several DCE courses currently have a special integration between UW-ACE dropboxes
and our PeopleSoft SIS to allow for assignments to be printed by our office and
distributed to instructors/markers. This process is under currently under investigation.
We have a variety of external applications that help maintain and create course content
for use in ANGEL. Course creation processes and documentation is maintained in a
local Wiki site. ANGEL documentation related to upgrades and testing, bugs are also
maintained in a SharePoint site and in a shared ANGEL course.
DCE support is closely coordinated with UW’s central ITMS support
DCE Users
While DCE courses are intended to be taken “at a distance”, the number of on-campus
users in DE courses has been steadily climbing over the past few years, and now
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represents ~80% of our course enrollments, each term we have ~10,000 unique
students taking DCE courses.
Information Systems and Technology (Groups ITMS and CSS)
Description of group/purpose
Instructional Technologies and Multimedia Services (ITMS) provides services and
facilities in support of the teaching and learning environments of the University. This
includes UW-ACE [our ANGEL installation], the e-classrooms, media production and
conversion, and presentation equipment loans.
Computer Systems Services (CSS) is responsible for the implementation, operation and
evolution of a number of computing systems at UW that support organizational
objectives, including UW-ACE.
Team Members/Roles
ITMS ANGEL team members:
UW-ACE Training and Support Coordinator (Jan Willwerth) –- responsible for
coordinating and evolving client support for the UW ANGEL Course Environment.
This includes implementing and evolving the campus user support model,
training coordination, documentation coordination, expertise in feature usage,
and campus wide communications about UW-ACE.
UW-ACE User and System Support (Sean Warren) – responsibilities split
between client support and aspects of support for the development and
production instances of the ANGEL software. This includes support in training
and feature usage expertise for clients. For system support, Sean investigates
and makes configuration changes for new UW-ACE requirements, writes local
scripts as needed, coordinates adoption of vendor releases, patches,
enhancements, works with CSS (see below) to support the ANGEL software, IIS,
and Microsoft SQL Server for ANGEL, trouble shoots to diagnose, report, and
correct ANGEL problems ,provide integration support for 3rd party software, such
as Turnitin and Wimba.
Campus ANGEL coordination (Andrea Chappell – Director, ITMS) –
responsibilities include coordination of the various ANGEL support areas within a
team operation. This includes: chair for the UW-ACE Operations Group (see
description at start of Organizations section), liaison to the University Committee
on Information Systems and Technology (UCIST), IST member for the
Instructional Technologies Advisory Group (ITAC), coordinator for security issues
(breaches, suspicious mark changes, etc.).
CSS ANGEL team members
UW-ACE Technical Architect (Lorne Connell) –, responsible for the overall
architecture and health of the ANGEL and associated systems; integration with
UW information systems such as the student system, electronic reserves; backup
and recovery planning; disaster recovery planning; high level trouble shooting for
the UW-ACE systems; planning and coordination of the major ANGEL upgrades
Windows Services Specialist (David Hinton) – responsible for understanding the
overall architecture of the ANGEL and associated systems in order to provide
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backup support to Lorne Connell. Also responsible for trouble shooting and
resolving system problems.
Workflow with ANGEL
Work flows and processes are included for various ITMS and CSS support activities.
Course requests: Instructors can use a UW-built web form to generate a
request that invokes an ANGEL tool built by UW. Or they contact support
personnel, such as their CTE Liaison, or ITMS staff, or send email to uwacehelp.
UW tool automates the course creation process. Requests are “released” by
ITMS; appropriate support staff are added to the course and email notification of
course creation is sent to prof and staff. Processes that are NOT automated:
copy forward of the content from a previous instance of the course; verify what
sections/cross-listed courses rosters should go into course; some apps are
added by request (access to 3rd party apps like Turnitin and Wimba; also ANGEL
Live, and standards & objectives tabs).
Course creation: UW “Multi class list” process replaces the ANGEL merged
course with which we encountered problems when we needed to change the
merged course set or create a merged course from an existing non-merged
course (cumbersome tool and process), and also for our team support. We
create a separate table that maintains the list of UW Registrar class lists to be
used for each course. This also allows us to more easily automate the creation of
various teams, based on the source class lists or tutorial sections, project
sections, etc. Another UW tool uses a similar process to create courses or
groups with other groups of class lists. Can easily add more lists later to either.
o DE sends course creation requests to Sean, who copies over the master,
adds the people in DE who should have access (script).
o If a new instructor requests a course, notify him/her of CTE Liaison.
Course maintenance: We have policies for when we create course archives,
backups and when removals are done, as well as when users (students,
instructors, others) are added, disabled and removed. Note: Command line tools
for archives, backups, deletions, etc., in addition to GUI interfaces, would be
helpful for building our own tailored tools, rather than writing from scratch tools
that may be broken in version upgrades.
Instructor help (features, content and QA): When they need help, instructors
may contact their CTE Liaison, uwacehelp (Jan and Sean), or take courses
offered through ITMS/CTE. We augment the ANGEL Help manuals with local
docs and “localized” ANGEL docs. DE versions of courses and docs are offered.
There is sometimes confusion over the differences in DE and ITMS support for
profs who offer courses in both areas. QA in the form of verifying feature set-up
or action script behaviour, and helping test feature set-up when the Preview tool
doesn’t allow “real” testing (v7.2). Course content is generally not part of the IST
offering, except in the following instances:
o Content layout templates in the Learning Object Repository,
o Audio and video file creation, compression/format, and upload for delivery
on UW-ACE.
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Student help: Most students contact ITMS’s uwacehelp email or call our contact
number, including distance ed/fully online course students. If the issue is a DE
specific one, hand off to DE staff.
Other processes: Access to files in dropboxes in order to provide DE printing
service; access to verify student in a particular class for Library e-reserves
access; UW gradebook export (to provide the UW-required student ID in export),
other UW instructor tools.
System checks: Inappropriate admin access, student enabled in disabled/old
courses, links to content in old/non-existent courses, ANGEL internal accounts
with weak passwords, instructors changing email address to other than
“username”@uwaterloo.ca, course creation requests remaining in queue for
release, PIN enrollment dates set, etc.
Support Coordination and Online Platform Governance: Support between the ITMS,
CTE, DE, and Library departments is kept integrated by the UW-ACE Operations group
connections and our meetings, Jan participating in CTE meetings, Sean as the key ITMS
DE support, and generally staying in touch at the staff and management levels. UW-ACE
Operations escalates important issues for discussion at ITAC (campus Instructional
Technologies Advisory Committee), and informs and brings recommendations forward to
UCIST (University Committee on Information Technologies and Systems) for approval.
Library
Description of group/purpose
Purpose is to make the world of information accessible – we are:
consultants/experts on helping students & faculty discover relevant content for
research and study; managers of our own content; obtainers of content we do not
already own/access
Many full-text electronic materials are provided directly, such as: research
databases; journal articles; e-books; e-reference materials;
numeric/statistical/geospatial data; e-theses; course-specific materials through
“eReserves”; specialized collections of materials such as those developed by
subject specialists
Use a wide variety of software solutions, the most recent being a search
engine (Primo) that will return unified results from both UW owned/licensed
collections as well as freely accessible resources
Paper (and other formats) provided through local collections or through
inter-library loans from around the world
Team Members/Roles
Allan Bell – Associate University Librarian, IT Services. Current library rep on
UW-ACE Operations.
Chris Gray – Systems Analyst. Coded the current custom eReserves system
Jennifer Haas – Department Head for Information Services and Resources
for the Davis Centre Library. Manages Liaison Librarians in Davis.
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Alex McCulloch – Circulation Manager. Manages the Reserves and
eReserves services
Workflow with ANGE L
Current relationship with Angel is focused on the eReserves services, although the
library is very interested in developing other links to Angel, which a number of other
libraries in North America have already done, for example:
http://wally.rit.edu/desire2learn/
eReserves intersects with Angel in 3 key ways:
1. The library uses the student course-registration information obtained by ACE in
order to authenticate students for access to course-specific eReserves material
kept on library databases.
2. The library provides course-specific javascript or urls to faculty members to
enable them to make eReserves readings accessible through Angel. These tools
include some built-in authentication so that students jumping off to library and
other databases from Angel will not need to authenticate, since they have
already authenticated in Angel.
3. The library provides a copyright permissions service as part of the eReserves
service, to ensure that any copyrighted materials are used legally, whether they
are used only in the eReserves database or whether they are also made
available through Angel. Some publicity is currently being developed on campus
that will highlight concerns about material in Angel that does not conform to
copyright needs.
The library has recently purchased the Ares Reserves system from Atlas Systems
http://www.atlas-sys.com/ Atlas has built a building block to the Blackboard CMS,
and, at our request, plans to approach Angel to do something similar with Angel.
http://www.atlas-sys.com/products/ares/BlakboardOverview.pdf
At an earlier stage, the library considered using the library functionality in Angel for our
eReserves service but there were some signification limitations. We have also
investigated a “Learning Content Management Solution” (EQUELLA) for this purpose.
This software offered a number of features that would be very useful for more advanced
course developers, such as learning object discovery and repurposing tools. However it
lacked the copyright management feature that we require. Future development of Angel
should include richer functionality in the areas of content support and management by
administrative units on campus such as the library.
Other Library Workflows
Some campuses have developed tools for dynamically pushing subject-specific
information to course pages. This could include key reference items; links to other
electronic resources important to the subject; contact information for the librarian in the
subject, and so on.
ANGEL Applied
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Unique Applications of ANGEL
Instructor Resources (LOR)
Description of group/purpose
The Instructor Resources (IR) repository includes a variety of resources such as
Learning Activities, visual layout templates and links to administrative information
relevant to teaching online at UW. The repository was initially created to allow for
course designers to have easy access to peer-reviewed (by instructional designers and
content experts) Learning Objects and Activities to help solve instructional bottlenecks
and facilitate course design. This repository group won the ANGEL Impact Award in
2006.
Team Members/Roles
Members from CTE, ITMS, DCE and Library
Workflow with ANGEL
The intended audience is anyone in the system who has Course Editor rights. The
repository is meant to be browseable through the front door, but is only to be editable by
members (because of the peer-review requirement). Tracking imported content usage is
a significant issue, and we’ve had to devise make-shift workarounds to accommodate.
Access management is spread across two LORs because of historical (Library) access
issues, and servers to prevent non-members from altering content, while still allowing
them to view it. It currently houses 25+ activities (several have variations within them),
and 25 layout designs which are manually made accessible as Macros through the
HTML editor.
Overall ANGEL Workflow
Define/Document/Create Graphic – How are courses envisioned? Designed?
Built? Delivered? Improved?
Can the model that is used at UW be incorporated into an ANGEL “Best
Practices” guide for how to use ANGEL to build better programs?
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