IUSM Educational Technology

On Thursday, July 2nd, Angel was upgraded to the newest version and migrated to new hardware. To prepare for the upgrade, I used VMWare to configure a server that replicated our 7.3 installation, and ran the upgrade on that server 3 times to become aware of any problems that might crop up. The upgrade was complicated by the fact that I was not only upgrading the system, but migrating to new hardware and changing the DNS name of the server. The old address was daly.medicine.iu.edu, which people had trouble remembering. It is now angel.medicine.iu.edu which is probably what people would guess it to be if they did not know for sure. Additionally, Angel has been configured since the beginning her to use a virtual directory (/med), which I did not replicate since it complicates administration of the system and is sometimes unsupported by Angel Learning. ePortfolio was upgraded as well, but I did not run this upgrade until the following Monday. The URL for ePort changed as well, becoming eportfolio.medicine.iu.edu. ePort’s URL change is not as dramatic, since you get to ePortfolio through Angel. There are some historical portfolios on the system which will not be available from their previous public url, but all of these are dormant. ePortfolio is not heavily used here at IUSM, although the concept of a portfolio system is attractive to a number of faculty.

On July 2, I came in around 4:30am to begin the process of migrating to a new server and upgrading Angel. The process went well and was completed at around 6:20am. I spent the remainder of the day cleaning up broken URLs and testing functionality of high profile courses. I also brought up a virtual server which could capture anyone coming to daly.medicine.iu.edu, and present a page with the new URL.

The change that impacts our Angel course editors the most is the deprecation of quizzes. All the quizzes in our Angel system have now been converted to Assessments, which have more features but a different interface for creating and editing. A close second for the biggest change is the way that support for IE 6 has pretty much fallen off the cliff. Angel 7.3 did not support IE 6, but it worked most of the time. Angel 7.4 has definitely left IE 6 behind. For some IUSM faculty, installing IE 7 is not an option because they don’t have administrator rights on their computer, and if they did, the Clarian apps have to use IE 6. The option for these faculty is Firefox which works fine with Angel, but they have to find their LSP and get Firefox installed. Sometimes they do not know who supports their PC and don’t want to mess with opening a support ticket to get a new browser, so this issue is tough in this environment.

The change for Angel admins is the move towards role-based access rights. After a day or so of reviewing the way that rights are granted now, this will not a problem for us to support. In the past, faculty and staff were bulk loaded into Angel with the default role of “student”. Due to the new way of granting rights based on roles, this has prompted some support calls but the fix is easy. We just have to change the user’s role from student to faculty or staff. Also different is the way that rights are granted to the historical “system editor”, but I created roles which duplicate the functionality that these people had in 7.3.

After a couple weeks, I discovered that we had been bitten by a bug which caused migrated assessements to lose the answers that were input into the original quiz. You can still see who took the test, and what their grade was but this didn’t help much for survey type responses where the answer was critical. However, my upgrade plan mitigated the risk of this type of problem by retaining the last-moment instance of the 7.3 install. For people that need the historical data, I have an instance of 7.3 as it existed on July 2nd, and I grant people a logon to use that version of Angel to retrieve survey or quiz results. Any assessments taken after 7/2 on the new system are available normally.

Angel 7.4 has been running for 2.5 weeks as of this post, and although not without problems, the upgrade has had less impact on day to day operations than has previous upgrades.