Memo to Penn State information technology officials: Students use ANGEL.

And during finals week, they use ANGEL a lot.

So when Penn State's course management system went down for hours at a time just as students were trying to study and take online exams, it was kind of a big deal.

A bigger deal, though, is that Information Technology Services (ITS) officials appear to have been blindsided by the problem.

A Penn State press release called the demand "unprecedented and unanticipated."

Unanticipated? Students read course materials and PowerPoint presentations on ANGEL. They turn in assignments to ANGEL "drop boxes." They take exams on ANGEL. It's not that difficult to see that demand is going to get really heavy at a university with enrollment of more than 100,000.

Penn State has promised to begin testing a faster database server and add more Web servers. But that's not enough.

Many professional Web sites aim to be working more than 99 percent of the time. Google, for instance, promises 99.9 percent uptime for paying customers on its Gmail service. That means it's unavailable for little less than nine hours per year.

ANGEL, by contrast, is scheduled -- not possibly, but guaranteed -- to go down for two hours each day.

Much of this ANGEL debacle mirrors the problems with Webmail. Penn State acted like it was a shocking discovery that students were checking their mail online instead of using a desktop e-mail client on a single computer. It took ITS years (remember Webmail 2?) to finally get a system that works even marginally well.

Penn State needs to stop messing around and give Penn State students the technology systems they deserve and pay for with a $212-per-semester information technology fee.

If Penn State is going to encourage all students to use its online tools, it should have a system that can accommodate that demand. It should be as reliable and easy to use as that offered by any private company and it should be available 24 hours a day.

If ANGEL can't meet these requirements, there are other alternatives that Penn State should consider. Companies like Blackboard offer course management systems that compete with ANGEL. There's even a free, open source competitor to ANGEL called Sakai.

In the information age, it's simply unacceptable to have a course management system that doesn't work reliably. Penn State needs to stop trying to make the system work a little bit better and find a system that actually works.