ANGEL Help

Activating Your Courses

Table of Contents

• Objectives
• Seeing your list of courses and controlling which courses are displayed
• Controlling student access to your courses
• Setting beginning and ending dates
• Activating a course
• Disabling a course previously activated

Objectives

• Learn how to see the ANGEL courses in which you are a member or instructor and control the display of those courses.
• Learn how to activate your ANGEL courses so you can control when students can see course content.
• Learn how to set beginning and ending dates for your ANGEL courses to control student access to course content.
• Learn how to disable your ANGEL courses so you can remove them from student view at the end of a semester.

  ATTENTION: This guide is for faculty only. (Students cannot enable or disable courses.)

  TIP: If you have not used ANGEL before you should see our Faculty Quick Start Guide on how to set up your ANGEL web site, and take full advantage of the features of ANGEL.

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Seeing the list of your courses and controlling which courses are displayed

Log on to ANGEL at http://angel.msu.edu using your MSU NetID and password.

You can view the entire list of ANGEL courses in which you are a member. Your role may be different in each of the courses. For example, you might be an instructor in one course, a student in another, and a guest in yet another. Your role in the course (e.g., instructor, student, or guest) determines the course resources you can see and change.

To see all of your courses, including those for which your department has declared you to be the instructor of record, and to control which are displayed under "Courses" in your ANGEL web site, follow these steps:

1. From the Home page, click "edit" on the My ANGEL Courses heading.
   
2. Under "Display Filter " you will see the complete list of courses in which you are a member. Check the boxes for those courses you want to see displayed under Courses. In the example below, the user is a member of two courses, and both courses will be displayed under "Courses."
   
3. To have disabled courses displayed, make sure "Yes" is chosen under Show Disabled in the "Advanced Settings" part of the page.
   
   By default, your course is initially disabled, meaning no students can see or enter the course. However, an instructor can see and work on the course while it is disabled to prepare it for student use.
   
   PLEASE NOTE: If your department or school has listed you as the instructor of record for your assigned courses, the courses will be listed under the "Displayed Courses" heading in Step 2 above. If the courses in which you are the instructor of record do not appear in the list of "Displayed Courses," you should contact your unit or department administrator.

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Controlling student access to your courses

To allow students access to a course, first follow the steps above so the course is displayed under Courses.

You need to take two steps to contol student access to your courses.

1. You must enable/activate the course by changing the course "Member Access " to "All Members". This will enable the course title to be visible to students when they log on to their own ANGEL web sites.
   
   At the end of the semester in which a course is scheduled, you must "disable" the course by changing the "Member Access" to "Editors Only" so that it disappears from the students' course listing in ANGEL. Please see below for how to change the "Member Access " of the course.
2. In addition to enabled or activating the course, you can set beginning and ending dates (see below) for the time period the course materials can actually be accessed by the students. If you choose not to set beginning and ending dates, then the course materials will be visible to students as long as the course is enabled.

Definitions:

Disabled -- If a course is "disabled" it doesn't appear on an enrolled student's list under "Courses" in the student's ANGEL web page. Whether you can see a disabled course on your own Courses list depends on whether you have chosen to display disabled courses.

Enabled -- If a course is "enabled," enrolled students will see it listed in their Courses section of their ANGEL web page. Whether they can actually access the course depends on whether and how you have set the Begins/Ends dates for the course. If a course is enabled, but the student tries to access it outside your chosen beginning/ending dates the student will get a message saying that the course is not available until the "Begins" date.

Remember that by default, your course is initially disabled, meaning no students can see or enter the course. As an instructor you can see and work on the course while it is disabled to prepare it for student use.

As mentioned above, there are two trip wires available so you can contol student access to your courses. The first, setting beginning and ending dates for access, controls when students can see course content. The second, enabling or activating the course, makes the course name visible to students in their listing of "My ANGEL Courses." The use of each of these tools is described in the following sections

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Setting beginning and ending dates

This section shows you how to set the beginning and ending dates for students to view course content, and how to change the title and other course information.

1. Go to http://angel.msu.edu/ and log on using your MSU NetID and password.
2. On the Home page, under the "Courses" subheading locate the name of the course you wish to activate, and enter the course by clicking on its name.
3. Click on the Manage tab, then, under the Course Settings heading, click on "General Course Settings."
   
    
4. Choose "Begins" and/or "Ends" dates for the course. To make those dates effective, mark the check box(es) next to the preferred dates. If you leave the check box(es) unchecked, then choosing dates has no effect, and students will be able to see all course content so long as the course is "enabled."
   
   In the example below, the course content will be accessible by students only between the beginning and ending dates that have been checked.
   
   
5. Click "Save" when done.

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Activating a Course

This section shows you how to activate a course so that it appears to students under their "Courses." When you are ready for students to see and enter a course, you must first activate it, as follows:

1. Enter the "General Course Settings" page as described above, and click onthe "Access" tab.
2. By default, the "Member Access" settings pull-down menu is set to "Editors Only ." Set "Member Access" to "All Members " to activate/enable the course.
   
    
3. Under "Guest Access", choose your preferred option from the drop down box. "Show on Search" option controls who can find your course from the ANGEL Course Search engine.
   
   The options for Guest Access are "None", "Authenticated", and "Anonymous".
   
   Choosing "None" will make it impossible for any guest to access your course.
   
   The "Authenticated Users" option will allow MSU ANGEL authenticated users to access your course.
   
   The "Anonymous" option will allow anyone with a browser to find and enter your course using the search engine. (Without even logging on to ANGEL!) Choose this option ONLY if you want persons outside MSU to be able to see and use some of the content in your course.
   
   
   
   If you are unclear on the details of restricting access to materials within the course, then you should consider setting "Guest Access " to "None" . Your students will be able to see your course so long as you set "Member Access to "All Members ," and you choose the Begins/Ends dates appropriately.
   
   TIP: Controlling who can access your course is always important. But if you allow access to your course through the search engine you must be very careful to set the viewing rights for course materials so that materials you want only your students and others in the course to see remain hidden to outsiders. This means that within the course you must take care to set the Viewable By options within the course to Students (or Members) for each and every content item or tool.
4. Choose whether you want to hide the course from the ANGEL search engine. Setting "Hidden" to "Yes" hides the course from the ANGEL search engine. This option overrides the "Viewable By" setting in the sense that if you set Hidden to "Yes" then no one will be able to see your course through the search engine no matter how you set "Viewable By."
5. Click the "Save" button.

Students in your course will now be able to see the course title listed under the Courses section of their Home page. If you have also set beginning and ending dates, and have checked the Begins and Ends check boxes, the students will have access to course materials for the dates you set.

If you chose to leave the Begins and Ends dates unchecked, the students will have access to course content as soon as you enable/activate the course.

TIP: You should advise your students to enter your course by logging on to ANGEL, and then click on the course name under Courses on their Home page.

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Disabling a Course Previously Activated

To disable an active course, follow the same steps listed above to activate (enable) a course, but select "Editors Only " from the "Member Access " pull-down menu:

1. Go to http://angel.msu.edu/ and log on using your MSU NetID and password.
2. On the "Home" page, select the appropriate course title under the "My ANGEL Courses" subheading to enter the course.
3. Select the "Manage" tab.
4. Select the "General Course Settings " link.
   
5. Click the "Access" tab, set the drop down box to "Editors Only".
6. Assuming the course has ended and you want to remove it from view in the ANGEL Search Engine, set "Show on Search" to "No".
7. Click the "Save" button.
   
   Now students can no longer see the course listed, and cannot access course materials. Furthermore it no longer appears in the ANGEL Search Engine.