Reflections on LMS systems: past & present

Inspired by Jeremy's post, I've been reflecting on the LMS systems used at my past universities.  To be quite honest, my recollection of the LMS system at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls (UWRF) is quite faint.  Part of it may be the five years that have passed since I graduated with my bachelor's degree, but I believe the larger contributing factor is the fact that the LMS system was used very infrequently.  I believe the year before I started my undergrad, our university had used WebCT.  My sister was four years ahead of me at UWRF, pursing a degree in secondary eduation with an emphasis on geology.  The education department did use WebCT a fair bit, but I recall Rachel expressing her frustrations with some of the features of WebCT and the professors' inability to use the system effectively.  When I started college, the university had switched to Blackboard.  As a biology major, very few of the professors utilized Blackboard; for those that did, it was simply to post the final grade of the semester.  One of the biology professors, Dr. Bergland, had developed his own website which we used for freshman colloquium and ornithology.  These were sites maintained using Dreamweaver and were his way of avoiding the university wide changes of LMS systems.  As freshmen, we were required to develop a personal webpage portfolio, which were were to update throughout our undergraduate career and use to showcase our skills as seniors.  These pages were developed using Dreamweaver, which created an immense number of headaches, broken links and befuddled students.  I sincerely hope that the department has switched over to the more simple and streamlined option of Google Sites. 

As both a student and a teaching assistant at my Masters institution (Missouri State University), I have zero memories of ever using an LMS system.  The course that I taught had a webpage on which we posted lectures and reading materials.  I maintained a gradebook and students were free to check with me at any time to see their current grade.

At UGA, my appreciation of eLC as a classroom enhancement tool has increased.  I have assisted my advisor for two semesters with Environmental Biology of Fishes and he makes full use of eLC: posts lectures, posts grades, provides links of current news pertaining to fish, and posts extra credit opportunities.  I enjoyed the use of the email feature in eLC to send follow-up comments to students after class about questions that had been raised during lecture.  The class that I'm helping to teach this semester has shifted away from eLC and we are using a Wiki exclusively.  However, this is a graduate level course, in which grading is not so pivotal.  I feel that the greatest weakness of switching to an external wiki is the loss of the secure gradebook feature that eLC offers.