After Andy Wiesner's ANGEL-intensive class experienced multiple delays with the course management system, he and 31 of his students decided to speak up.

Thirty-two e-mail complaints later, there might be a solution.

After months of collaboration between ANGEL Learning and Penn State, ANGEL will get an extreme makeover May 19.

ANGEL version 7.1 will look sleeker, have reorganized content and new visual themes -- all based on feedback from faculty and student focus groups, Jeff Swain, ANGEL New Products Specialist, said.

The Portal Web site will now be integrated into ANGEL, class rosters will be found under a new "Communicate" tab and the workspace has been increased. The "What's New" sidebar will be an improved "To-do" list with the option to filter unviewed pages and class assignments by date. Users will also be able to personalize their ANGEL page through course themes, such as a handcuff background image for criminal justice courses.

Swain added that initial faculty and student reviews have been positive.

However, Wiesner said despite ANGEL's outward overhaul, he is still concerned about ongoing internal problems.

ANGEL cannot be used from 5 to 7 a.m. daily because of maintenance. It should then resume operation, but unforeseen problems sometimes cause delays, Wiesner said.

Incidents in the past have resulted in his 8 a.m. STAT 200 class starting late, resulting in students not having adequate time to complete quizzes.

"It puts you agitated right off the bat," Wiesner said, who designs his classes to take up the full 50 minutes. "To me, it just has a huge negative impact."

And there's a carryover effect, he said. On quiz days, students file in for his next class at 9:05 a.m., only to find 8 a.m. students still sitting at the computers.

ANGEL has been available for use "99.99 percent" of the time, not including the maintenance window, said John Harwood, Senior Director of Teaching and Learning with Technology.

"Invariably there are a lot of different things that can go wrong," he said. "Some have nothing to do with ANGEL, per se, power outages."

Swain said the university is constantly adding new servers to support the content management system and the new version of ANGEL will not strain server resources any more than the previous version.

Harwood said they've been working with faculty to streamline courses. Multimedia such as videos, audio clips and podcasting will be put on a streaming server, not right on the ANGEL server itself.

"The feedback we're getting from our help desk is that there still are hiccups, but they're getting few and far between," he said.

Wiesner said he thinks that Telecommunications and Networking Services (TNS), which maintains ANGEL, could switch the maintenance hours to 4 to 6 a.m. -- but understands it would affect everything TNS maintains.

Two mirror-image versions of ANGEL currently exist, he added -- one in the computer building, another in Shields building. He added, if a third version was implemented somewhere else, ANGEL could operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which would be the best-case scenario.

"That would be a very expensive solution, but it would be a solution," Harwood said, adding that they are assessing the cost right now.

However, not until faculty and students sit down with administrators is anything going to happen, Wiesner said, adding he has already begun to take action by having a conversation with other faculty members about the problems.