ANGEL as UW CMS: Why ANGEL?

Prepared for UCIST
by Andrea Chappell <chappell@uwaterloo.ca>

Created for distribution December 12, 2003
Last updated 22 January 2004

This document accompanies the document entitled “ANGEL as UWone CMS: Activity Summary for May 1, 2004 Release” which describes the activities required to offer a basic Course Management System (CMS) at UW (called UWone CMS in this document). This document outlines some issues regarding ANGEL as a candidate for the CMS.

Note: This is a draft and requires more detail and supporting materials.

CyberLearning Labs

(From cyberlearninglabs.com, About Us, December 2003.)

"CyberLearning Labs and ANGEL evolved from research conducted by the CyberLab at the Purdue University School of Engineering and Technology on the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis campus. The initial research system deployed in 1996 became Indiana University's OnCourse. Still in use today, the system supports nearly 100,000 students on six Indiana University campuses.

Based in Indianapolis, Indiana, CyberLearning Labs, Inc. was founded in July 2000. Our commercial evolution included a significant investment by Indiana University and its Advanced Research and Technology Institute. ANGEL was created using the early system concepts and was made more generally applicable and maintainable with a tailorable user interface, flexible backend database integration, and a high performance, reliable component architecture."

CLL claims ANGEL is growing at over 100% per year.

Number of employees: (from CLL)

CLL has about 15 people, with additional individuals used on a contract basis. CLL dedicates approximately one third of its people to product development. Executive management’s long-term business model allocates this level of resource on an ongoing basis to both maintain the current product and to develop exciting new product innovations. CLL dedicates approximately one third of its people to services and support, allowing us to be responsive and attentive to our current and future customer needs. The remaining third is for adminstration including sales and marketing.

Some advantages of CLL:

As a smaller and newer company, CLL does not have the inherent problems with legacy code and entrenched customer base. This means CLL can be more flexible to accomodate changes. They have provided excellent support in helping adapt ANGEL to our current UWone LSS environment, both by coding changes themselves, or assisting in our code changes.

A significant portion of ANGEL’s power lies in its ability to be tailored to specific institutional needs. Penn State, a large ANGEL installation, makes significant modifications to their installation. If we assume that making local modifications is important at UW, especially for, but not limited to, the LSS development, this development environment becomces very important.

Their technology is based on state of the art tools within Microsoft, and on standards.

ANGEL feature set

• Accompanying document outlines the basic ANGEL features (V5.6).
• CLL overview of the new V6.0 (late 2003 release) features.

Pricing

• We are working with CLL to determine our licensing needs. Pricing will be available sometime in February based on our findings. We now pay $25,000US (annual) for a 12,500 user license.

Some ANGEL Customer Information

At the start of 2004 ANGEL has over 70 licensees on over 150 campuses. In all, there are approximately 400,000 ANGEL users. There is an ANGEL user mailing list, and the second ANGEL User Conference will take place in May 2004. UWone LSS members attended and presented in 2003.

• Penn State University (since August 2001)
  • Penn State selected ANGEL because its component-based architecture and exposed API allowed them to customize it to meet their specific needs.
  • 1000 faculty members adopted in the first 6 months (for about 32,000 students). Currently they have more than 47,000 individual students using ANGEL in more than 3,000 courses.
  • ANGEL is used as a complement for traditional courses in all of its 26 campuses and in its on-line university, the World Campus.
  • They have done quite a bit of local customization, adding and changing features.
• Michigan State University (early 2003)
  • Moved from Blackboard to ANGEL as the preferred common platorm.
  • MSU uses ANGEL for the entire university including the Virtual University on-line.
  • MSU serves more than 44,000 students and places a great emphasis on excellence in undergraduate education.
• State University of New York (SUNY) - 7 of the 64 campuses
  • SUNY Brockport chose ANGEL in August 2001 based on a four product comparison because its intuitive interface and advanced administration features allowed them to rollout an enterprise CMS without huge support costs.
  • 7 SUNY Schools on ANGEL: Erie Community College, Jamestown Community College, Niagara County Community College, Schenectady County Community College, SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and Plattsburgh State University.
  • Total licensed users for all schools is around 40,000 users.
• UCLA (May 2002)
  • Selected because it is Windows-based, easy to set up and administer, and because of range of features, some of which were not available in some of the more popular course management systems (Manager, Faculty New Media Center).
  • Small license of under 1000 users.
• Indianapolis Public Schools (November 2000)
  • IPS uses ANGEL to provide a single portal for teachers, students and parents to teach, learn and communicate.
  • 40,000 accounts.
• Iowa Wesleyan College (August 2001)
  • 40% adoption in 6 months, with a total of 40 hours of training (for faculty, none for students).
• Providence College (August 2001)
  • Providence College adopted ANGEL for its features in a six product comparison.
• Peel District School Board
  • About 3000 users (contact Ross Williams).
• Ole Miss Online at The University of Mississippi
  • One semester, sychronous, fully accredited online courses. Students at the University of Mississippi register for these courses exactly as they register for any other on-campus course.
  • Ole Miss Online courses are developed and conducted by University of Mississippi faculty members and approved by appropriate department chairpersons.
  • About 2000 users.

CMS Comparisons including ANGEL

• SUNY Brockport chose ANGEL in a four product comparison in 2002 because its intuitive interface and advanced administration features allowed them to rollout an enterprise CMS without huge support costs.
• Edutools.org offers feature-based comparisons for many CMS products and will be used as a resource for this project.

Questions

Should we review the market again?

• The market leaders are the same as 4 years ago (WebCT and Blackboard still the most prevalent), based on decisions made 3-5 years ago. Newer players, like CLL's ANGEL and Desire2Learn, are making inroads, but in terms of market share are just now breaking in. However, they are showing up along with the traditional key players in new evaluations.
• This market is still in flux. The standards, the scrutiny of the online learning environment space and directions by large organizations like NLII, the experiences people have had so far, and movements like OKI (an MIT based project that considers the infrastructure to "assemble" CMSs from component applications) mean that many changes are on the horizon.
• A proper review of features, involving the campus, would take at least 9 months, probably a year. We now have committed to ANGEL for two more years.

How important is it to keep the LSS and CMS on the same platform with a "flexible" environment like ANGEL?

• LT3 and Distance Education have invested a fair amount of time in thinking about what they would like in an online environment. While the needs seem different from those of a basic CMS, there is benefit from being able to adopt the "good" outcomes and practises for everyone. If we are on separate platforms the adoption is much less likely to occur, at least not without a lot of effort and will.
• If we diverge, instructors and students to have two online activity interfaces if they use both the LSS and CMS for their courses.

What if CyberLearning Labs (ANGEL vendor) goes "belly up"?

• We are quite well protected by standards. IMS content packaging allows the export and import of courses between systems that conform to standards. While the workload would be significant, it would be doable (and would be required if we decided to change CMS vendors at any point).