E-mail this pageANGEL Course and Content Management System
ANGEL (A New Global Environment for Learning) is Plattsburgh State's course and group content management system, online at https://angel.plattsburgh.edu/ .
Using ANGEL teaching faculty can lead moderated online discussions, use online drop-boxes for collecting assignments, create self-assessing quizzes and tests, track attendance and student progress, maintain a gradebook and a course calendar, isolate course mail from other e-mail, post course content, and even import course materials from competing course management systems (like the Blackboard or WebCT modules that sometimes accompany texts). And all of this happens through a user-friendly web-based interface, allowing faculty to work on their courses wherever a web browser is handy.
Students can benefit from the ANGEL system both by way of their instructors' course enhancements, and also by taking advantage of the private dropbox that the system provides each user: students, like faculty, can gain a degree of document portability between labs, home, and computer classrooms via the network storage the dropbox offers. Students will also be able to use ANGEL to maintain personal calendars and create online 'bookmark' repositories.
The system also serves the organizational and administrative processes of the college, allowing groups (like departments, committees, organizational units, academic interest groups) common areas in which they may carry on discussions, share a group calendar, and take advantage of the same survey, content creation, and dropbox functions that the system makes available to teaching faculty. And, because group leaders, like the faculty, can assign varying levels of access to all materials, the groups can conduct their affairs with as much or as little visibility as they desire. (A search committee might, for instance, would want to restrict access entirely to its members; a department might want to expose some areas to faculty, some to students, and some exclusively to its own members.)
Because of ANGEL's flexibility and modularity, the course management system can server both as a supplement to classroom-based courses and as a complete package for the delivery of fully online courses. The range of course enhancements that ANGEL can provide to all types of teaching activity is destined to generate a good deal of faculty interest.
Training on the ANGEL system is available as part of the regularly scheduled Instructional Technology workshops, and via the Help Guides link that appears at the bottom of every ANGEL page.
The workshops address a wide range of faculty, student, and staff needs: specific workshops will address the components of the course management system individually, for those who wish to use only selected features; other workshops will introduce the full range of ANGEL's features; other workshops will discuss, in broader terms, best practices for taking advantage of online tools and resources. Check for workshop offerings on the schedule at http://faculty.plattsburgh.edu/it/workshops.asp .