Emails with the subject line “Angel timeout” have likely frequented the inboxes of student and faculty Portal accounts this past week, due to a misconfiguration made by Blackboard, Inc. during system maintenance.

“On 10/25/2013, Blackboard had scheduled Angel to be moved from the Angel datacenter to the Blackboard’s cloud-based hosting,” said John McGee, coordinator of academic technology, via email. “The timeout issues were a result of misconfiguration made by the Blackboard, Inc. hosting team during the move.”

Regardless of recent hiccups, Angel remains the most reliable learning management system the university has used to date, McGee said.

“Overall, Angel has been much more reliable than the previous LMS,” McGee said. “[It] was nearing end-of-life and was hosted on UNA servers. The move to Angel provided more features, improved stability, and more robust disaster-recovery options. Other than this initial stumble with the configuration, Blackboard, Inc. hopes this move to their cloud-based hosting will improve the reliability of our Angel system.”

A system upgrade is currently under consideration, McGee said.

“UNA is, and has been, evaluating Learning Management Systems for potential replacement of Angel,” McGee said.

Christian Baynes, the previous SGA representative for distance learning, thinks the university could do better, he said.

“Angel does not have the best layout, and it’s not the most user friendly,” Bayens said. “There’s something better out there. I know Blackboard has an app that in some cases runs better than their online version.”

Junior Natalie Martin wishes university technology professionals would give faculty members advance notice, she said. 

“If they are going to work on Angel they need to let the professors know ahead of time so they will not schedule due dates on the days they are working on it,” Martin said. 

Nancy Atkinson, an associate English professor, said she thinks the LMS has been unreliable since the beginning. 

“I know that when we acquired it, it had so many problems that most of my students could not access my syllabus,” she said. “I ended up having to email about 160 students (I was teaching an overload). So my first impression was very bad.”

These impressions have not changed over time, and Atkinson still refrains from using Angel whenever possible, she said.

“I just do not find much use in it, other than saving the paper used in printing a syllabus,” Atkinson said. “I do not to give (like) a test this way, and I need hard copies to read (because of my neck arthritis). The Angel timeout caused problems for Abby Ruggiero, a freshman social work major, who was unable to turn in several homework assignments on time, she said.

Kristen Wooten, a freshman, said she has not received a terrible impression of it. 

“It hasn’t really affected me because I haven’t even checked Angel that often,” Wooten said.

Anna Dean, a senior HES major, only had a minor mishap last week, she said. 

“I’ve been kicked out of the Angel system and sent back to the home page where I had to log in again,” she said. “It only happened once or twice. I was just checking on assignments that I had due, but I wasn’t actually working on anything, thank goodness.”

Dean actually prefers Angel over the LMS used at the institution she previously attended, she said.

“It’s pretty easy to navigate. Here’s your calendar, here’s lessons, here’s your grades. It’s just all right there when you click on your class.”