Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Angel out, D2L is in: Students and professors reflect on the switch

May 21, 2015

It's been counting down to its own end for a year. And now, Angel, the once primary learning management system at MSU, is retired and being fully replaced with D2L, or Desire2Learn. 

According to the website, MSU has been exploring alternatives to Angel since 2009 and in July of 2012, D2L was officially selected as its replacement.

Students and professors who are familiar with and accustomed to using Angel said there were challenges to having to learn how to use a new system.

For interim chair of the Department of English and professor David Stowe, switching to D2L presented a challenge because of how different it is from Angel.

“At this point, I’ve adjusted to D2L. It took me a little bit of getting used to and in some ways it is a harder system. It’s not quite as intuitive as Angel was, or maybe I was just so used to Angel that it felt comfortable,” Stowe said.

For students, the transition from Angel to D2L wasn’t as tough as it was for professors who are required to have a deeper understanding of the system.

Graduate student Lauren Baywol said she was used to using Angel, but the transition, although it took a while, was necessary.

“It was the system I was most used to just because I finished up undergrad just this last year. So when they switched to D2L it took a while to get used to that system, but Angel had a lot of bugs so it was probably about time that they got rid of it,” Baywol said. “I think it is organized better and I think that the drop boxes and everything being really easy to find and your grades and everything all being on one system are really helpful."

African American and African Studies doctoral student El-Ra Adair Radney said he enjoys the features D2L offers.

“I don’t think Angel had the expansiveness that D2L has with regards to having a grading system, an attendance system (and) an email system all there at your capacity and those things could be linked together,” Radney said.

Support student media! Please consider donating to The State News and help fund the future of journalism.

Discussion

Share and discuss “Angel out, D2L is in: Students and professors reflect on the switch” on social media.