Here’s a little mini-tour through one of the many reasons why Angel, and other course management systems, drive me crazy and basically beg for me not to use them. This has to do with a simple and common course management task: Sending an email to all students in a class.

First of all, if you were using a basic email client to do this task, sending an email would be a matter of creating a distribution list for the students in the class — a one-time startup task — and then the following:

1. Type the name of the list in the To: blank. (Most email clients have an auto-complete feature that doesn’t even require you complete the full name of the recipient.)
2. Type in the subject and text of the email.
3. Hit “Send”.

Three steps, each of which is easy and intuitive.

If you want to do this in Angel, on the other hand, it becomes a seven-step task, which is really nine tasks — each of which,…

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