For the past year, Penn State's ANGEL support team has been stepping up its effort to enhance the course management system with new or improved features. This effort, which received a push when the University decided to continue using ANGEL as long as it is supported by parent company Blackboard, is wholly based on listening to requests from the Penn State community.
Ten enhancements have been implemented since last spring:
- My Grades component for students on the My Profile page linking to a course Grades tab
- MobileMail tool
- Deep Link Wizard allowing instructors to include a link to a course tab within an email to students
- Ability to synchronize an ANGEL calendar with other commercial calendar applications
- Reduced maintenance window
- Ability for a group member to leave a group
- Ability to sort the course listing on the My Profile page
- Instructor ability to choose whether or not to display drop/add information in the My Courses component
- Print function on the course Syllabus tab
- The course Calendar tab highlights the current date when in month view
The team has felt a sense of urgency to address user requests, explained Jeff Swain, manager of campus learning design in Information Technology Services (ITS), as there had been a lengthy lag in ANGEL improvements while the future of ANGEL at Penn State was up in the air.
In May 2009, said Swain, Blackboard announced they would no longer support ANGEL after the end of 2014, and were no longer taking enhancement requests from Penn State. "And quite frankly," he said, "we were doing the same thing, figuring ANGEL was going away." Then in spring 2012, Blackboard reversed its decision and announced it would support ANGEL through 2017.
"We had a backlog of over 400 enhancement requests from faculty, staff, and students from shortly after the Blackboard announcement in '09 through the fall of '12 that we could now address," said Swain. The ANGEL support team condensed similar requests together and reduced the list to 230 items. These were placed in a survey categorized by the area within ANGEL. In early spring 2013, all students, faculty, and staff received the survey and were asked to indicate their top five desired enhancements in each category.
The ANGEL team picked the top-rated items according to the survey results to focus on first, while at the same time implementing quick, easy requests right away to check them off the list. The planning process also involved identifying items that are interrelated and should be addressed simultaneously.
Brian Beiswenger, IT manager, and Andy Fisher, programmer/analyst, who spearhead the team of ITS programmers working on ANGEL, gave a behind-the-scenes look at how the 2013 survey results translate into actual enhancements to the application.
"We went through the list, and stuff that took a short amount of time or effort, we just went through and cleaned those up and put those out right away," said Fisher. "Some of the other ones were more involved, anywhere from a complete rewrite of an interface to adding a new tool."
Beiswenger explained, "We didn't want to touch the same code multiple times, so we tried to compartmentalize the changes." Course mail was an ANGEL tool that he said trickled to the top as having many different enhancement requests from the community, especially in terms of viewing mail on a mobile device.
Mail was not the only ANGEL feature that was difficult to view and navigate on mobile devices, however. "We've really improved the smaller screen experience," said Fisher. "It became apparent that if we wrapped some of the complaints about mail in with responsive design-type changes, we could kill all those things at the same time," referring to a type of web design that allows the elements of a page to display in a usable way no matter the size of the browser window or device screen.
The development team does not work in a vacuum, according to Beiswenger and Fisher, but rather seeks input on each stage of their work in progress, in order to release the most usable ANGEL tools to the Penn State community. They gain feedback by presenting demos to units such as World Campus, working with instructional designers, and requesting comments on Penn State's Yammer social network.
Once an ANGEL programming change is completed, it is put through its paces for testing by an IT Service Desk team including IT manager John Carnicella and IT support specialists Nick Yingling and Christopher Hirsh.
However, Fisher noted that in some instances, the development team deploys an enhancement that will work "pretty well," but that they know is not yet perfect. "We can then get it out to our customers faster," he said, and in a way, those customers assist with the testing process. "They can give us feedback right away. They can hit more browsers than we ever could and get us that information and then we can patch it and get a fix out there," said Fisher.
Swain, Beiswenger, and Fisher all underscored how valuable user feedback is. "When you write to the service desk with a suggestion, at the time, we may not be able to give you the answer that you want, but that doesn't mean that it necessarily goes away," said Swain. "We're listening and we're working together with you to make it all it could be."
Fisher agreed, saying, "If you want us to ever look at anything, we take every single enhancement request that comes through. If you have an idea of how things might look better, put a request in; we go through those."
"I would much rather see more feedback from faculty, students, and staff," said Beiswenger. "I think that helps us not only as we shape ANGEL, but as we shape the future learning management system beyond ANGEL."
How to provide feedback to the ANGEL support team
- Any faculty, students, and staff can complete the ANGEL Support Contact Form
- Members of the Penn State Yammer social network at http://yammer.psu.edu/ can join the group entitled ANGEL Dev Happenings and post questions to the development team.
How to learn more about ANGEL enhancements
- Read news posts on updates that have been deployed in the ANGEL section of the Teaching and Learning with Technology website
- Opt in to the ANGEL Listserv
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Attendees of the March 22 Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology can attend a session titled "What's up with ANGEL?"
Future enhancement plans
The ANGEL team continues to plan and develop additional enhancements to the application. "We're still early in the list," said Swain, "and we definitely want to keep it ongoing for as long as we'll have ANGEL as our course management system."
Specifically, Fisher mentioned the following enhancements now under development that will be released in the coming months:
- A revamped discussion forum interface that will simplify viewing on a mobile device, similar to the MobileMail tool
- Additional calendar enhancements, making it easier to use
- Added notification icons on the My Profile page. Fisher said, "When users log in, particularly on mobile devices, we're going to add a new feature for notifications. One of the complaints we had from students is that when they log in to ANGEL they don't know what's new. It will show up as a footer with Twitter- or Facebook-style notifications." These will indicate the number of new mail messages, new discussion forum posts, and new grades.
Anticipating an ANGEL replacement
While enhancements will continue to be made to ANGEL through the end of 2017, Penn State is taking the long view ahead to evaluate the future of e-learning at the University. "We're looking at alternatives to replace ANGEL," said Terry O'Heron, interim senior director of ITS Teaching and Learning with Technology. "We are in discussions with Blackboard to pilot Blackboard's Learn platform this summer and fall as a potential replacement for ANGEL.