ANGEL system upgrade causes unexpected errors

The ANGEL system has been a bit devilish this summer, following an upgrade from version 7.2 to the new version, 7.4 in mid-May.

Problems with the upgrade were reported soon after the change, said David Gift, vice provost for libraries, computing and technology.

“It was quite immediate,” he said. “Of course the start of summer semester is very intense because of half-term courses and usually problems with ANGEL are noticed right away.”

Gift said MSU upgraded ANGEL after grades were entered for the spring semester and before summer classes started to minimize inconvenience to faculty and students.

The problems affected about 4 percent of ANGEL users, according to an e-mail notifying the MSU community of the bugs.

The courses that were affected were mainly multisection courses and courses that used ANGEL in complex ways.

“One of the problems with a place the size of MSU and the number of users is people invent use cases that can’t be tested for,” Gift said. “It’s impossible to think ahead of time of all the ways that unusual use cases where bugs (might) show up.”

Gift said MSU anticipated finding some bugs after an upgrade, but he was concerned there were so many, especially since MSU participated in a limited field trial in the spring.

“We were very disappointed that the bugs that occurred were so frustrating,” he said. “This upgrade was tested in a limited field trial in spring semester that MSU and other universities participated in. Bugs were detected then — problems arose with the database conversion software and in ANGEL itself.”

The problems included seeing error messages when grade remarks were more than 2,500 characters, problems with links to outside images and issues with reading sent mail, according to MSU’s ANGEL help Web site.

Gift said MSU staff members are working bugs with the merged courses. He hopes progress will be made by next week. They are waiting to receive code fixes from the vendor, ANGEL Learning.

Jonathon Schramm, a research associate who is teaching BS 110, Organisms and Populations, said ANGEL worked well for his class.

“In fact, it wasn’t until afterwards that I realized people were having problems,” he said.

Ilya Rahkovsky, an economics graduate student who taught EC 201, Introduction to Microeconomics, said although he hasn’t had many problems, there were some issues.

“I remember it was down a few times for four or five hours,” Rahkovsky said. “It was (an inconvenience at the) time. If students had problems I allowed them to submit their homework later.”

Staff writer Brittany Shammas contributed to this report.