For those of you unfamiliar with courseweb or blackboard (the blackboard academic suite) or whatever, I will describe it briefly so I can bitch about how I don't like it. It is a place where you and your professor can attempt to communicate through things like announcement and document postings. It can actually be quite useful. It can also suck balls pretty hard.
For example, my Research Writing professor uses the announcements page a lot. I mean a lot. She posts what were going to be doing in class, our homework etc. all as announcements. They therefore appear on the announcements page for that class. The page is organized by posting date and there is no option to change the order of the posts. The assignment due date or class day she is referring to also appears in the title of the post, and I feel this is the more relevant information. Perhaps I just want to be able to filter out posts I don't have to worry about, perhaps by showing things due in the next week only or something to that effect. Or perhaps they should reorder themselves as the due date gets closer so I don't have to read every post in the past two weeks to find out that we will be in the library on Wednesday.
Here is the payoff from this stupid and protracted post. If you are designing a website, keep the end user in mind (students). If you are using a website, keep the end user in mind (students). Or, in the words of the great Peter Pratt, "always keep the end at the beginning." So yeah, usability is way more important than features and aesthetics. Flexibility and customization is nice too.
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I'm surprised you did not have a complaint about a professor abusing the system. In the U of A, we use d2l and webassign. Webassign is embarassingly stupid since only the math department uses it and you are only allowed to submit answers x number of times, removing the ability to learn from your mistakes.
d2l is a general purpose class website for teachers who don't know how to spell HTML, let alone script a page. The downside is, that they believe all 80-300 (I had a class in the top range once) students have precognitive abilities so you don't have to say that a new assignment is online.
Example: in my 300+ student class, we had our first lecture on the first Friday of the school year. Apparently, there was an assignment due 10 minutes before our professor first mentioned it. Needless to say, 80%-ish of us got zeroes on that one.
Moral of the story: Learn to use these newfangled contraptions like the Internets instead of burdening us with your shortcomings.
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