As of Jan. 7, professors across campus have been given the option of officially switching their classes from ANGEL to MSU’s newest online learning tool, D2L. But the switch, which is optional until 2015, already is being used by many classes.

“I’m still trying to get used to it,” Ostergren said. “(And) I was still kind of surprised because we got the e-mail like a week before classes and it was like, ‘We are no longer using ANGEL. Here you go, here’s the new one.’”

Since 2009, MSU had been looking for a replacement for ANGEL after Blackboard purchased ANGEL’s company and determined the site eventually would be phased out, Brendan Guenther, the IT services director of MSU’s teaching and learning support team, said in a previous interview.

MSU chose D2L in the summer of 2012, and this semester is the first time students and faculty can use the program in the classroom.

The new program will not get overloaded as easily as ANGEL did, will work on different types of browsers, such as Safari and Google Chrome, and will perform efficiently on mobile platforms, Guenther said.

There currently are 140 courses logged onto D2L, which Guenther said is promising considering it is only the first week of the semester.

Assistant psychology professor Brooke Ingersoll is among the first wave of faculty members to jump over to D2L and said the new program is more intuitive and user friendly.

Ingersoll said so far, she prefers D2L because it is visually appealing and has many different ways to “drop and drag” and access the material. She also said the calendar function is much easier to use than it was on ANGEL.

“In terms of just putting up material, it seemed to go pretty well,” Ingersoll said. “It’s hard to know because my students are just now accessing it, but I’m hopeful.”

Ostergren said she has liked being able to organize herself, find her syllabus and share assignments on ANGEL. But she said she feels as if she still will be able to do this on D2L.

Ostergren is taking an online and a traditional course that are using D2L this semester, she said.
Guenther said the new system will be very beneficial to online courses, where most of the course communication is done in the educational site.

Faculty members have until 2015 to phase out ANGEL, which will prevent D2L from having glitches and overloading, Guenther said. Transitional obstacles should be mended as faculty members and students begin to slowly trickle over to D2L throughout next couple of years.

“I would say ANGEL’s available 99.9 percent of the time, and that’s pretty good. But, it’s not good enough,” Guenther said. “It (always) needs to be available to the institution.”