ANGEL 8.0 Upgrade Information for Empire State College Students and Faculty

The college will be upgrading from ANGEL 7.4  to ANGEL 8.0 in early August.

Why? This will ensure vendor support through the transition to Moodle, which will begin in Fall 2013.

When will the upgrade take place?  The upgrade is scheduled for Aug. 2-4. This means that the ANGEL learning platform will be unavailable to students and faculty from 8 a.m. EDT on Thursday, Aug. 2 through about noon EDT on Saturday, Aug. 4. 

How will this affect me?  Students and faculty in 15-week Summer 2012 (SU2) term courses should make note of this system downtime and plan accordingly. This will not interrupt submission of course outcomes for the eight-week Summer 2012 (SU1) term. Other students and faculty using ANGEL simply need to be aware of the scheduled downtime in early August.

What can I expect to see when I log into ANGEL after the upgrade?  There will be no change to the homepage.

What's New for Faculty 

Discussion forum grading rubrics. Faculty now will be able to use a grading rubric for discussion forums as well as assignments. These rubrics are created on the Manage tab of the course through the rubric manager.

Dropbox visibility options. Faculty now can set "Start Accepting Submissions" and "Stop Accepting Submissions" dates when editing a dropbox. A student who tries to access the dropbox before or after these dates will get a notification in bold red that "Submissions are not being accepted at this time".

Browser support for desktop versions of Google Chrome and Apple's Safari. Students and faculty now can use Chrome and Safari to work in ANGEL. However, the college still recommends and supports Windows Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox since applications used in online courses/studies may not function well with Chrome or Safari. Students and faculty are advised to continue using Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox when working with Empire State College administrative applications such as Registration, DPPlanner and PLA Planner.