While the university's heart was in the right place, it was trying to do too much, too fast when it implemented ANGEL.

ANGEL, also known as A New Global Environment for Learning, and MSU's new course management system, has been less than heavenly for off-campus students who have experienced nothing but trouble since the system was implemented in August.

Although ANGEL was tested over the summer by a small number of faculty members, problems are beginning to arise during its first full week of operation. These problems should have been foreseen by those officials in charge of setting it up.

Forgetting to check the availability for all potential users is simply careless planning on the part of the university.

Officials have been unable to pinpoint one common problem in the system that is causing ANGEL to fail for off-campus users. While students do come onto campus, busy schedules often mean they can't stay on campus all day.

Hopefully officials won't be saying the same thing in a week because students desperately need to do their homework now.

It is commendable that the university is trying to make important technological upgrades after being behind in the times for several years.

But perhaps this time university officials bit off more than they can chew. With the new e-mail system, mail.msu.edu, running into glitches since its debut, university officials should have foreseen potential problems with its other new device.

University officials chose ANGEL to replace Blackboard by May 2004 with the best intentions. They said it has better features - including accessibility. Yes, they really did say this.

While this is ironic in reflection, real solutions need to be made quickly to ensure the system is up and running throughout the community because the old excuse "the computer ate my homework" can only work for so long.