Investigative Reporting Post

ANGEL's layout is very plain and standard. It is headed by a Penn State Crest and a title, "ANGEL Course Management System" in the upper left. In the top center are several links that branch to the other various Penn State online services including: Library, Registrar, Webmail, Portal, and Search Penn State. On the let is a panel with several buttons with symbols: A home symbol, a question symbol for support and a logout symbol. Before signing in, the main ANGEL page has in the middle body section Public Announcements and Top Stories, neither very occupied nor interesting. On the left is where a guest would select logging in and below that is a warning telling me that my server is not supported by ANGEL, but that doesn't stop me from logging in. A new window pops up with the main page still open and I enter my Penn State info and it leads to a new but similar screen. Curved Blue rectangles still manage the organized content, but now the content is student specific, with all my classes in blue writing, on the left is more student-specific announcements and a Teacher Effectiveness Report (whatever that is). I click on one of my class names and it presents a new screen where all the class info, such as lecture notes, quizzes and other activities are placed in different folders. When I click the content I want, sometimes I am brought to a new screen within ANGEL, sometimes I get a pop-up, sometimes it downloads a PDF, and sometimes my browser crashes. For being so organized ANGEL sure can be a handful. And my least favorite part is when I log in but have other Internet windows up, it will deny ANGEL access!

"The specificity of the answers ANGEL wants suck."
&
"I feel like it doesn't help you learn as much as written assignments where you see teachers' remarks."
Zach Prediger-Freshman-Engineering

"Am I blanking? I just can't think how you could add an extra credit question into an ANGEL assessment - not in the gradebook - A faculty member wants to have an extra-credit question at the end of the quiz.... is there a way to get it to calculate automatically as extra credit?"
-Suzanne Shaffer- A PSU Teacher -Got it off a ANGEL community blog


Right on ANGEL's homepage it tells me my browser, common Safari, is not supported by ANGEL, it recommends Internet Explorer 7 or 8 (which also have their share of problems) or FireFox. More exploring of the website also led me to find a wealth of information about the entire university. From Penn State's fact book in ANGEL, I found the operational budget of the entire university is $4,016, 433,000! There was a ton more information to search, and ANGEL acted like a more refined and organized psu.edu. ON the ANGEL help page it further outlined the problems with Safari and Chrome saying mail, discussion forums, and gradebooks do not work right on these. I found this funny cause I use Safari with none of these problems.


During my initial research, I've gotten a better understanding of what I am am to write, this was like an pre-outline. I realize teachers are having much bigger problems with it than students, so they will be my audience when I criticize it. But it is a good program for students, so when I praise its features, they will be my more intended audience. I would rather please the readers than have them second guess themselves for this report. I also forgot about how annoying Internet use got following ANGEL being used, so that will be another critique I forgot about with the program.

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