This has to be one of the biggest problems that I have come across during my time as a student at Plymouth University. The student portal that the university provide is the worst thing in the world. I don't know if its because the developers are too lazy or they just cant be bothered but something that is supposed to make our lives easier in fact makes things twice as difficult and after talking to a couple of my lecturers they completely agree from their side that the system is in now way intuitive and the simplest task can take ages to figure out how.
However this is not my biggest complaint about the system, THE biggest problem is that there is no way to subscribe to the service, if one of your lecturers posts a new article for the next day there is no way of knowing it is there unless you go to the trouble of logging in, and going through at least 2 links to get to where the thing has been posted and you have to do this process for every module, and then we also have to check our emails to make sure there isn't anything on there. All I'm asking for is a simple system that either ties into the email system or a way to get an RSS feed of a module so i don't have to check all of the folders at least twice a day and heaven forbid if you miss an important announcement for that day because you couldn't be bothered to jump though all the hoops of the system.
A bit of thought and a bit less Microsoft dependance could result in a really good system, I'm sure there are already open source solutions out there! Also please don't presume that everybody uses internet explorer there are a lot, and i mean a lot of people that choose not to be a slave to microsoft and actually use a decent brower. I dont know whether it is this love for IE that has lead to the view i am currently getting or the developers have just decided that the live domain is as gooder test bed as any.
Come on Plymouth, sort it out! You can spend enough on the physical world, now how about making our lives easier in the virtual one!