Bonus Grade Items

Hope this clears up any confusion with Bonus (Extra Credit) grade items in the Talon grades tool.

Adding the Updates Widget to your Course Homepage

With the changes in Daylight, the convenient links to recent assignment submissions no longer appear on the the My Courses widget below the course title. Watch this video to learn how to add the Updates widget to a custom course homepage as a work-around.

Updating VOD Links

The new VOD player presents videos in a more attractive and device agnostic format. The old player relies on Flash plugin technology and creates problems for some users. We are encouraging all faculty with VOD links in their courses to update prior to the start of Fall 2017 courses. The video shows several common ways you might be linking to VOD items and how to update them.

Old link URL look like this:

http://www.kirkwood.edu/site/vid_player.php?id=7256

The new link URL looks like this:

http://www.kirkwood.edu/vod/7256

The highlighted segments show the difference. The number at the end of your links will also be different as this number represents the ID of the specific video.

Spring 2016 Bug Tracking

More bugs may be listed in the first bug tracking post. Or just search for "bug" in the search box.

Video Full-screen Playback goes Black -- Under the Content tool, if you have uploaded a video file to the New > Video or Audio option, when you play back the video and view it fullscreen, the video keeps playing but the screen is black. Note, this is only for video files added directly to Talon. Does not affect YouTube or VOD videos. (Fix ETA - unknown)

Draft/Published Switching -- When you change an item from draft to published or published to draft, it should change the label, but the page doesn't seem to refresh so appears stuck even though the item status has indeed changed. If you refresh the page, you will see the status is updated. FIXED!

Save Grade Item Dialog doesn't close -- If you create a grade item from the Assessment tab on a quiz for example, and click the Save button, the dialog overlay doesn't close when you save. If you try to click save again, an error will occur since you already have created that grade item.

Repeat Descriptions on Course Schedule -- Under the Content tool, the course schedule appears to be duplicating the description of items - only for Dropboxes. (Fix ETA - End of February) FIXED!

Date Displays Incorrectly for Instructor on Special Access -- If you have given a student special access to a quiz, the end-date displayed for instructors is oddly inaccurate. The good news is that is displays correctly for the student, and the correct date is enforced. It will just look odd for you. (Fix ETA - End of January) FIXED!

Quiz Retrieval from LOR Error -- If you try to retrieve a quiz published to the LOR, it will fail. Work-around is to share the quiz as an export or add the instructor you are sharing it with your course as a Course Reviewer. (Fix ETA - End of April with 10.6.0)

Completion Tracking and Bubble Numbers

Always exciting to learn something new - a little humbling when it's so obvious.

Talon has 3 different modes for completion tracking of content items in a course. The default is set to Required: Automatic. This mode checks off completion for students mostly when they click the link to the content item. For a dropbox or quiz it waits for an actual submission, but mostly click and it's marked complete. The second mode is Required: Manual - this mode let's students decide when they are finished with that content item. The student checks the box themselves to indicate (to themselves) that the item is done. The third mode is Not Required - no check box appears to students at all.

What I recently learned is that the bubble number displayed in the Table of Contents under Course Contents is different for faculty and students. For faculty, the number represents the number of required content items. For students, it is the number of remaining required items that need completing within that module. As students manually or automatically check items off, the number goes down. Once they complete everything a green check marks the entire module as complete.

With this in mind, take care on how you set completion tracking for your content items. Simply going with the default Required: Automatic may not be communicating what you intend to students.

Student view of Course Contents showing Required: Manual completion tracking.

Release Final Calculated Grade Column to Students

The #1 asked question: Why can't students see their total score? The Calculated Final Column is hidden from students by default. You must release it after students have added your course for them to see this grade item. Alternatively, you could create a calculated grade item of your own and include all the assignments and assessments in your course -- as long as your activities remained consistent, this could be copied from term to term.

But for most, releasing the calculated column will be simpler. This video shows you how:

Bug Report

I like to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. As software evolves and updates are added, little unintended consequences of a coder's or designer's actions make themselves known. These opportunities present themselves as annoyances and may delay us or cause us to speak of work-arounds which are often as clumsy as they sound. They also make us think. And they inevitably lead to improvements. Mistakes will happen. We will learn from them.

With that said, here are some bugs we are working through.

Awards Tool Missing Some Text Labels - This bug only appears in courses with an apostrophe in the title. So probably pretty rare. Be careful how you title your DEV courses and sorry Children's Literature instructors. (Fix ETA: End of January)

Cross-listed and Merged Course Naming - If you have a cross-listed course or decided to merge your courses in Talon, the resulting course name drops all identifying information. For instructors teaching more than one of these courses, they can wind up with multiple courses of the same name on their My Courses list. Confusing, we know, it's confusing for us too. This one is internal and we are working with IT to create a solution. (ETA: Early-Mid October) Fixed: Instructors can now append a 6-character Course Identifier to merged and cross-listed courses on the Course management for Faculty page.

Assignment Grader/Pulse Apps - New users of these apps are routed back to the login page or Talon environment after they log in. The app functions are not available. Talon Tech support is working on a solution to improve our custom login pages that will allow these apps to work again. Fixed!

Awards Not Publishing to Profile - The new awards tool should allow students to publish their earned awards to their Profile page. Doesn't seem to publish anything right now.

Disable Pager and Alerts for Quizzes - The default for this is supposed to be turned off, but when instructors create a quiz directly on the Course Content tool, this advanced setting is incorrectly enabled. If students begin a quiz with this setting enabled and do not submit the quiz, they will receive a permission error when trying to access email or the pager tool in Talon. Recommended work-around is to create your quizzes under Edit Course > Quizzes and then return to the Course Content and use the Add Existing Activities button to link to the quiz.

Emails Flagged as Spam - Not really a bug, but still... This appears to be email client specific and depends on your personal email spam restrictions. The best way (we've come up with) to make sure no student email goes to your junk folder is to create a Rule in Outlook that sorts all email with @student.kirkwood.edu into a specific Student Email folder. Your personal rules are applied in Outlook prior to Junk rules.

Progress > Quiz Attempt Listing - When you look at the Progress tool, Quizzes section, if you have any quizzes that have been attempted more than 10 times, you should see the LAST (most recent) 10 attempts listed here. Instead, we are seeing the first 10. To see all attempts, you will need to use the Edit Course > Quiz tool and then access the Grade item in the actions menu.

Progress > Quiz Listing - The sort order of the quizzes here is INTENDED to be the order in which the quizzes are graded. This does not seem to be the case at the moment. It actually appears to be quite random. In any case, do not expect it to match the order you have designed under the Quiz tool.

Support, D2L - When grading dropboxes, you might see a user named Support, D2L. Just ignore this guy. 

Deleted Quiz Questions Still Count - When you delete questions from a quiz that has already been taken, Talon should recalculate the scores without those questions. Instead, Talon is retaining these scores even though the overall score has decreased. The only work-around is to manually grade these questions, giving zero points. (Fix ETA: End of November)Fixed!

Bonus Item Grade Symbol Not Showing - I've noticed this with Bonus items only. If they are set to only show the grade symbol and no points or percentage, then nothing shows in the gradebook at all. Change it to a non-bonus item and it displays fine. (Fix ETA: End of October) Fixed!

Copying a Quiz with Images (or other associated files) - Images (or other associated files) in quizzes are being excluded from the copy process when using the Copy Select Components tool to copy a quiz from one course to another. Work-around is to move the images separately to the corresponding directory in the new course. Copying an entire course will move the images correctly.

Bug Found: Copying A Survey with Branching

With the Talon Survey tool, it's possible to create branching scenarios. The branching lets you skip questions that might not be relevant to some responders. We recently discovered the branching does not copy correctly when using the Import/Export/Copy Components tool. If you use this tool to copy a survey with branching, you will need to re-configure all the branches.

Angel Q&A - SP8 Update

Questions concerning some new features in Angel/eLearning with Service Pack 8.

Request a Course via Vine

How to request a new eLearning/Angel section as a Vine loop. Vines are 6 second video loops.

Angel Q&A - Reply Only Forum

How can I create a Reply Only discussion forum?

Assignment showing the wrong total possible points

Question:
I am grading an assignment in Angel. When I go to assign points for the assignment, it is displaying the wrong points (100 points). What is happening and how can I fix it?

Answer:
If the assignment is showing the wrong number of points, in this case 100 points. A possible option would be that it is not correctly linked to the particular assignment in gradebook. This is a dead giveaway if the assignment is showing 100 points, as 100 points is the default point total for any assignment by Angel.

To fix it, find the assignment and open up the settings. Click on the Assignment tab.  In the gradebook settings, click on the dropdown and select the item in the gradebook you wish the assignment to be associated with. If you do not see the assignment listed, you may need to create it in gradebook first.

Manual override of grades in gradebook

Question:
A student has taken an assessment, in the submission manager it shows the correct number of points but in the gradebook, it is showing the student received at 0? What is causing this?

Answer:
A simple solution to this could be that manual override has been selected for this particular assignment. If you open the grade entry grid in gradebook and click on the item, it will open a pop-up that will allow you to type in the points for that assignment. In the upper right corner (see below).

If you click override calculated grade, it will allow you to put in a different grade than what was assigned to the assignment.  If at some point you had manually added a score and clicked override calculated grade, it would show whatever your manual score was, instead of the score angel assigned. Even if this grade changes in the future through Angel, it will always be overridden with the score if the Override calculated grade is checked.

Now if there is only one or two individuals who had their grades overridden you can manually go in, click on each student and unclick Override calculated grade. If there are quite a few students, it might be easier for you to go in, delete the assignment in gradebook (not the assignment in the lessons tab), and recreate the assignment in gradebook. Once the assignment is linked back up to the item in gradebook, it should auto-populate the assignment with the correct scores.

Angel Q&A - Sharing Objectives

Q: How can I copy and share course objectives between Angel sections?

Responding to Emails sent through Angel

Question / Issue: 
I received an email that a student sent through Angel and it was forwarded to my email. What is the correct way to ensure that the student gets the response?

Answer:
The correct way to ensure that the student gets the response is to reply to the student in the same way that they sent you the initial message. If they send you the message from Angel you will need to log into Angel and send them the response back. Problems arise when click "reply" to reply to the question.  When Angel sends an email to you from the student, it inserts the student's Kirkwood email address as the sender. When you click reply it is sent to the student's Kirkwood email address which may or not may not be the student's primary email address (or one they check very frequently), and thus leading to the claims they have not been getting your responses to their questions.

Adding an internal / content link

Question:
How do I add a link to another page within my Angel course?

Answer:
To do this you are going to need to add a content link.  Go to the page you want the link to be on, choose settings and select the text you want to make into a link. If you are editing a link, clicking anywhere on the link will be fine.  In the tools, select the content link button ( it looks like a folder with a link on it. See image below).

In the window that appears you will want to click on the Map tab. This will allow you to browse through your course, much like you would see using the tabs. In this example I am going to link to another lesson, so opening / clicking on Lessons displays all the items I have on my Lessons tab. If the items were divided up into more folders, I could dive deeper into the course by opening up those folders. Find the item you want to link to and click on it.

 You should now have an internal / content link in your document.

Angel Q&A - KirkwoodLMS Blog

Highlighting some new additions to the blog and course requesting availability.

Syllabus not showing up after upload.

Question:
I uploaded my syllabus into Angel on the syllabus tab, but students are still unable to see it. What went wrong?

Answer:
The solution here is fairly simple. Once you have uploaded the syllabus on the syllabus tab, you will still need to tell angel which syllabus you want to use. Go back to the syllabus page, and you will see the dropdown. If you have uploaded your syllabus correctly, it will be listed on the drop down. Select your syllabus. Then click the "Save Syllabus" button. Your syllabus should now show correctly for students.

Students seeing calendar items from past course

Question:
Students are reporting to me that they are seeing assignments on their calendar for classes of previous semesters, that they no longer have access to. What is happening and how do I fix it?

Answer:
Even though students may not have access to a course anymore, it still exists within the Angel system. A possible cause for this could be that a faculty member accidentally put in the wrong dates, or changed the dates when they were going to copy the course for another semester. Either way, to fix the problem, the faculty member will need to go in and delete the events from the calendar for students to stop seeing them. This shouldn't be an issue as the course is over and the only person who has access to it as the faculty member themselves.

Limit on attachments sent through Angel

Question:
Is there a limit to the attachment file size sent through Angel's email?

Answer:
Yes there is. The limit is 2 megs, but this can be increased on a case by case basis depending on need.