What's New in ANGEL 7.3

ANGEL LMS 7.3 offers a host of new features designed to enhance the teaching and learning experience for faculty and students, simplify LMS administration, and ease integration of the LMS into the enterprise. With a primary focus on usability, ANGEL LMS 7.3’s many updates make it even easier to use. 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.

Simple Customization

Now anyone can customize their course experience, and ANGEL LMS 7.3 further empowers instructors to teach they way they want to teach. Drag-n-drop page editing, a simplified page structure, a new theme editor, and a host of new pre-packaged themes provide an extremely flexible and customizable display. And our new CSS driven site design and use of open source user interface libraries make it easier for screen readers to access information for visually impaired users.

Effective Discussion Forums

ANGEL LMS 7.3’s new discussion forums make it simple to create an online environment that fosters enthusiastic student participation. Common pedagogical models for using discussion in the classroom are built in. A peer review option allows students to rank the value of other students’ posts in the forum, leading to more interactivity, greater student feedback, and a greater feeling of “connectedness” among students.

For instructors, ANGEL LMS 7.3’s discussion forums offer a host of time saving features. Multiple view modes and search filters make it easy to find and act on discussion posts, either individually or in batch mode. Discussion settings allow instructors to configure the discussions in their courses to meet their specific educational requirements and personal preferences. Instructors can create messages in advance and have them automatically appear on the forum at pre-determined points in the class. And grading rubrics allow the system to evaluate student behavior according to instructor established rules, making it much easier for instructors to evaluate student activity within a discussion.

Powerful Algorithmic Questions

ANGEL LMS 7.3’s new algorithmic questions give instructors in quantitative disciplines the power to create randomized, formula-based questions that are automatically graded by ANGEL. ANGEL LMS 7.3’s algorithmic questions include powerful variable definition, flexible rubrics allowing for multiple partial credit and unit synonym scenarios, and the ability to replace variables algorithmically in WebEQ equations. Algorithmic questions support drilling since students can practice one mathematical concept with different values and answers to develop mastery; as well as to prevent cheating since questions and answers are always randomized.

Enhanced Administrator Usability

ANGEL’s signature ease of use is now built into the Administrator Console, improving and simplifying administrator workflow. Drag-and-drop customization, meaningful task organization, batch operations, and ready access to data simplify and streamline day-to-day administrative tasks. Enhanced deployment and configuration options and settings give administrators the ability to customize their configuration around the institution’s specific needs.

Wizard-Based Enterprise Integration Framework

ANGEL Extended Enterprise Integration (XEI) 7.3 takes the power of ANGEL Agents and applies them to enterprise data integration. The same agent technology applied to helping faculty automate their work is now available to administrators to automate data administration tasks. The result is a simple, yet powerful tool that allows the organization to import data from other systems in the academic enterprise, such as student information systems, enrollment management, or authentication/authorization services – without programming or command line tools.

Open Access Improvements

The ANGEL LMS was the first commercial LMS to provide support for import of the IMS Global Learning Consortium’s Common Cartridge format. ANGEL LMS 7.3 includes an update to the most current state of the IMS standard. ANGEL LMS 7.3 also includes a direct link to the ANGEL Learning Isle, a cooperative effort between ANGEL Learning and the Second Life Educators community (SLED). ANGEL Learning Isle provides a virtual world designed for educational experimentation within the popular Second Life application.

Improved Documentation and Field-Level Help

New to ANGEL LMS 7.3 is the addition of “How To” elements to user documentation. These “How To” elements are mini tutorials on the most frequent uses of the ANGEL LMS. Field-level help has been completely rewritten for ANGEL LMS 7.3. Field-level help now includes more comprehensive assistance as well as a feedback loop to solicit input from users for future modifications.