 "Photo: Ted Copeland/ The Olympian")
There have been many complaints recently regarding the online Angel program such as how slow it has been running and features that are not working as planned.
According to Tom Jacobs, customer service manager for the Information Technology department at Olympic College, the college along with 13 other schools across Washington state is using Angel through the same host site using Washington Online. The use of Angel statewide has increased by 550% since last year. Over the past month, to fix some of the problems, WAOL has added more servers, specifically from 12 to 40 just in Washington.
Another reason for the problems was upgrading Angel from version 7.3 to 7.4.
As with any upgrade, there will be pros and cons to the system, so OC is not the only college affected by all the technical difficulties. WAOL has set up a team to specifically work on these problems with individual colleges. They meet every week to discuss how they can do this.
One of the ways to fix the slowness of the program was to shut off some key features of Angel. The ‘what’s new’ feature that pops up after students and faculty log in has been taken off. This feature showed when new forums were posted and if emails were received in the inbox. By shutting this feature off, it has significantly increased how fast and stable Angel has been working.
However, students and faculty now have to manually check on any updates to their classes. This is especially a hassle for faculty who may get several hundred emails a day about questions regarding their online assignments. The WAOL team is trying to find a way to bring this feature back without bogging down the system.
Another feature that was modified was the size of announcements. It was discovered that because so many announcements can be made vastly over the entire state that by reducing the size of them has greatly helped with how fast the program works.
“In the past few weeks Angel has worked faster and is more stable,” said Jacobs.
WAOL are planning to work out the next patch of problems for version 7.4. Fortunately, for OC, a former employee is on WAOL’s taskforce, Brian Dahl, who was the director of Information Technology, is now involved at a state level.
Internally the department is looking to prevent any further issues that may occur next quarter like scheduling issues.
Jacobs said, “I feel that Angel is overall a good platform to use once all the technical bugs get worked out.”
“We are in the process of hiring a part time employee to help support faculty with curriculum on Angel,” said Vice President of Instruction Mary Garguile. They hope to hire this part time employee within a week.
Tiffany Dawson, program assistant for Distance Learning, is re-designing the Angel home page to make it more user-friendly for students. Dawson is also creating a pamphlet to leave around campus to help students learn about Angel.
Kevin Blackwell named a few problems that his students have been having with Angel since spring of 2009. One was that Angel would crash the first time students logged into it and the second time it would run fine. The second was that to submit an e-mail the wait time was significant and impatient students would click on the submit button until it goes away ultimately sending as many e-mails as how many times they pressed that button.
Jacobs took notes of these problems that were brought up by faculty at the two forums held Feb. 2 and Feb. 5 and will be looking into getting them resolved.
Ruth Ross reminded faculty that WAOL sent an email to all instructors with a survey to fill out of any problems faculty are still having. This survey can be filled out as many times as needed. Jacobs said they sent the e-mail because WAOL may have fixed some problems that were more pressing but they know there are still issues that they are not aware of that faculty need to inform them of.
Students and faculty are still having problems such as html codes showing up on discussion boards when students respond in forums. Another problem was attachments in the discussion board are still an issue because faculty cannot either open the attachment or they have to right click on it and save it before opening.
Barbara Martin, Jacobs, Ross, Dawson, and WAOL, are working hard to iron out the rest of the problems with Angel. There is still no timeline for when these problems will be fixed but it is hoped that by spring quarter Angel should be running more smoothly.
As of now Angel is running faster and can still be used. Garguile suggested that OC have more Angel forums until all the difficulties are worked out.
Jacobs said, “Angel is working hard to win our hearts back.”
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