Everyone’s favorite course management system — affectionately named ANGEL — will be upgraded from version 7.4 to version 8.0 on June 2nd between 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. It’s hard to understand why they would even consider changing such a flawless and idyllic system, but at least they haven’t decided to replace ANGEL with one of those inferior, user-friendly frameworks like Blackboard.

Here are the major upgrades that you can expect to see once the great eight-oh is implemented:

Assessments: Students will now be able to mark a question for review and return to it at a later time while taking an assessment on ANGEL. In addition to this convenient addition, it seems that the invaluable accidentally-hit-backspace-and-lose-all-of-your-work feature will not be removed during the upgrade. Clutch.

Drop boxes: Professors will now be able to set a date to “start accepting submissions” and a date to “stop accepting submissions.” This will circumvent the occasional lazy professor that decides to wait until a week after the assignment was due to begin grading, allowing the common slacker like myself to slip in their work three or four days late with no penalty.

Discussion forums: As if these forums didn’t already spark some of the best collegiate academic conversations I’ve ever seen, they’re about to get even better. Professors will now be able to grade forum submissions directly within the forum itself, apparently with the option to wait until after the forum has been graded to provide the rubric to students.

With upgrades of this caliber for ANGEL 8.0, one can only imagine what the progressive minds at ANGEL Learning, Inc. will throw at us next.

About the Author

Zach Berger

Zach Berger is a StateCollege.com reporter and Onward State's Managing Editor Emeritus. You can find him at the Phyrst more nights than not. If he had to pick a last meal, Zach would go for a medium-rare New York strip steak with a side of garlic mashed potatoes and a cold BrewDog Punk IPA. You can reach him via e-mail at [email protected] or on Twitter at @theZachBerger.