Final Report, Course Management System Subcommittee, Flagship ...

Louisiana State University and A & M
Request for Information
Course Management Systems
Due: March 30, 2007
1. Content Tools
a. Course templates - tools to help create the initial structure for an online course
ANGEL content templates make creating pedagogically sound course content and learning objects
easier and more efficient. Templates provided in ANGEL can be used as a starting point for
content development, or an institution, group, or individual can develop preferred templates.
Templates that use ANGEL’s triggers and actions to release materials and send alerts allow every
ANGEL user to take advantage of these advanced capabilities.
Modifying a template rather than recreating course content and learning objects provides time
savings. Using templates ensures consistency in the look and feel of courses.
ANGEL ships with five system templates; institutions have the ability to create their own
templates.
b. Instructional design tools – help to create learning sequences via templates or
wizards
The ability to build and publish content templates within ANGEL enables instructional designers
and instructors a method of create pedagogically sound course content and learning objects
easier and more efficient. Templates provided in ANGEL can be used as a starting point for
content development, or an institution, group, or individual can develop preferred templates,
depending on their specific pedagogical approach.
ANGEL also offers a Design Guide written to provide pedagogically-sound course design.
ANGEL’s Design Guide was created with the assistance of an instructional designer from Penn
State University.
ANGEL also provides wizards for creating certain content elements such as required post
discussion forums.
c. Content creation – ability to create and place materials into CMS
ANGEL’s content manager gives the course designer/instructor the ability to create content
easily and efficiently. The content manager includes tools for creating digital drop boxes,
games, discussion forums, quizzes, pages, and links to outside websites. ANGEL also includes
a WYSIWYG HTML editor and wizards to create pedagogically-based models such as Fishbowl,
Hot Seat, Debate and Required Post Discussion Forums.
d. Text editor
ANGEL’s inline HTML editor enables non-technical users to publish web pages in ANGEL with
effective formatting, web links, and graphics images. ANGEL’s HTML Editor has integrated math
editing that uses pure HTML (sup/subscript, symbols, fractions, macros and more). The editor
also includes the Universal Keyboard.
An integrated Word HTML cleaning utility removes extra tags from pasted MS Word content; a
Macro Editor (categories, macro support, save templates, canned messages, equations, and
more); ANGEL link dialogue for easy relative linking to ANGEL content items; Property inspector
for easy access to image, link, and table properties; Enhanced file dialogue for uploading content
and linking to it; Enhanced image dialogue with browsing and image preview support. ANGEL’s
HTML Editor supports the following image types: avi, qt, ra, ram, rm, wma, wmv, mov, mp3,
mpe, mpeg, bmp, gif, jpeg, jpg, jpe, png