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[oldfullprof]

As someone who taught around 12 webcourses, I'd like to get rid of Blackboard.  (I don't actually think webcourses are such a great idea, but they're okay for working people, and are especially good for applied, professional, or technical programs-- where there's simply a need to transfer a body of knowledge.  They're correspondence courses, okay?)

I had the privilege if using SUNY's Lotus Notes Webcourse program (before they got rid of it for sucky Blackboard.)  It was great.  It was attractive, not entirely web-based (as fragile BB is) (because it was housed on your machine and you replicated to a server,) and WYSIWG oriented.  You could absolutely put math formulae on it and have them come out just the way you put them there.  You could move charts, graphs, and the like to Lotus Notes without distortion.  Try this on BB.

Best of all, LN allowed you to display the entire course in multicolored tabs, lectures, discussions, support material, and all.  You could see the discussion trailing off under the relevant lecture or whatever, inviting you to join in.  The discussion area of BB is an abortion, uninviting, ridiculous.  And I wouldn't trust my grades to BB's "gradebook."  Every chance it'll go down at those crucial times like end of semester.

BB requires students to punch through mystery URLs to go anywhere, or do anything.  Not so Lotus Notes.  Let's go back to it.

[zharkov]

Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, has an open source project you may want to look at, called Chandler:  chandlerproject.org.

It isn't quite done, although you can download a "we're still working on it" copy, but it has a lot of potential.

[csguy]

Are you speaking of  Lotus Learning management. A bit different than just Notes.

Probably more common in corporate environments.

[zharkov]

Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, has an open source project you may want to look at, called Chandler:  chandlerproject.org.

It isn't quite done, although you can download a "we're still working on it" copy, but it has a lot of potential.

Here is an update:  Chandler 1.0 has just been released.  You can download (free) it at chandlerproject.org

[econmom]

I also had the "privilege" of having to use Lotus Notes at a SUNY school and it was terrible--very, very limited functionality, no gradebook. 

Since SUNY has switched to ANGEL, the time it takes to manage my online courses has fallen by 50% and I am doing MORE in the courses.  There is no comparison.