Published on March 20, 2008

To optimize the performance of Penn State's Course Management System, ANGEL, during spring finals week, the Import Wizard and Export Wizard tools will be turned off from 5:00 a.m. Saturday, May 3 until 7:00 a.m. Saturday, May 10. These tools include the Copy Course, import Content Package, import Master Course, and export ANGEL Archive functions. The tools for importing and exporting individual lesson content items between courses and groups will be turned off as well. These temporary changes for that week are one of a number of steps that have been taken to improve ANGEL performance during the period of intense usage associated with finals week.

The Copy Course tool allows instructors to copy one of their existing ANGEL courses into another course section. A master course is a special course set up as a template that multiple instructors can import into another course section. The ANGEL Archive tool is used to download a backup of a course as a ZIP file; this file can then be imported into another section using the import Content Package tool.

Instructors who need to use these tools to set up a course for the summer session are encouraged to plan ahead and perform necessary course imports or exports prior to finals week. During finals week, instructors can continue to create course content and to create master courses and learning object repositories and students can continue to upload/download files and access lesson content.

As a more long-term measure to optimize ANGEL performance during finals week, Information Technology Services is installing new hardware with 300 percent greater processing capacity than the hardware available in fall 2007.

For any questions, contact ANGEL support at angelsupport@psu.edu.

For more information, please contact ANGEL Support (angelsupport@psu.edu).

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