A WSU faculty senate committee is in the late stages for selecting a new learning management system (LMS) to replace Angel.

Due to a lack of maintenance and updates, Angel is slated to be retired as WSU’s LMS by fall semester 2014. The program was installed in 2009.

“Angel is a discontinued product,” said Christopher Coons, director of educational logistics and technology at the WSU Global Campus. “What we have right now is kind of stale, and that’s one thing we’re going to get, is something more modern.”

The committee is fast-tracking its timeline to have vendors come to the main campus to do a demo open to the public, Coons said.

The committee has now narrowed the search down to three vendors: Blackboard Learn, Canvas, and Desire2Learn, Coons said.

The committee is made up of faculty members who rely heavily on a LMS in their instruction. It also includes a few students to give input on the receiving and learning end of LMS.

“It’s the best group we could possibly have for this,” said Craig Parks, chair-elect of the faculty senate and psychology professor. “It’s great that we got a few students for this, you gotta have that input.”

According to the committee’s website, the new LMS would ideally have features such as a dropbox that would allow batch uploads with no file restrictions, or more customization available for course pages.

Last semester a survey was conducted to assess the WSU community’s attitude toward Angel. Based on the results from the committee’s evaluation website, ease of use and hosting files ranked highest in importance whereas blended learning and custom pages ranked lowest.

Park has used WSU’s last three LMS, which have become an integrated part of his instruction.

“Having LMS is very important to me,” Parks said. “With everything I post to Angel, it’s probably not even 10 percent of what I can do with it.”

Blackboard, the company that owns Angel, announced in 2012 that it would cancel its initial end-life plans for 2014 and would continue to support Angel.