Student and professor opinions are clashing over Penn State's adoption of a new online course management system known as ANGEL.

ANGEL is the course management system used at Penn State. It allows professors the freedom to mold the system to fit their individual teaching methodology. ANGEL is especially useful for professors who wish to post syllabi, discussion boards, and announcements online without using HTML.

The program is approached basically two different ways, David Babb, research associate in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, said. ANGEL can be used for courses that are completely online or as a communication station for students and professors, he said.

"(ANGEL) provides students with contacts and handles discussion boards," Babb said. "Without it, students would have to access a site with separate links to discussion boards and announcements."

"I liked that all transactions could be accessed in one place: updates, links, discussion boards and email," Anjaili Soi (junior-electrical engineering) said.

Wendy Rizzo (sophomore-Spanish) agreed.

"I like that you can access the syllabus online and that all the professor's Web pages are in one place," Rizzo said.

Nitin Samarth, physics professor, said ANGEL appealed to him because it is a Web site being run by educational services, instead of being locally managed within the physics department.

"The physics Web site takes technical expertise and resources," Samarth said. "ANGEL is more convenient because it updates the class lists automatically."

ANGEL also limits the number of e-mails delivered to Samarth's personal inbox, because e-mailing for classes utilizing ANGEL is done through the course management system.

In a class of 600 students, Samarth has found ANGEL especially helpful in sorting personal e-mails from course-related emails.

Rizzo also cited the e-mail system as ANGEL's most appealing asset."

I like how it lists everyone in the class and you can e-mail them that way," she said.

Another attractive asset ANGEL offers is the ease with which quizzes and surveys can be set up, Samarth said.

ANGEL does, however, have drawbacks. Large multi-section courses are difficult to manage using ANGEL, Samarth said.

Rizzo expressed frustration with downloading Microsoft Word documents and Power Point presentations.

"(They) take forever to download, and once you get them they're a quarter of the actual size," she said. "They're absolutely microscopic."

Leah Critchley (freshman-graphic design) said she has difficulty understanding the system as do some of her professors.

"How is ANGEL efficient if I don't know how to use it and neither do my professors?" she said.

However, more problems were expected from ANGEL than have occurred, Babb said.

"We tell students that they are the pioneers in terms of online education and that they should expect problems," he said.