Sometimes I've had the idea of making a sort of "fan page" for my university (Tampere University), because their own homepage is so horrible. On the surface it looks OK, but actually it is quite difficult to use in actually planning which classes to take. The fan page would be maintained by students who are actually taking those classes, combined with pressuring the teachers to take part. This is where I think it wouldn't really work, people couldn't be arsed to help, so I haven't attempted it.
I feel so embarrassed for our faculty. I mean they have classes on UI design and usability, yet it's beyond them to make their own pages usable. This is the home page of our logic programming class: http://www.cs.uta.fi/~tn/LOGO_kotisivu_2009.htm I wouldn't mind the yellow background and the all-caps text, if every other course would just have the same information in the same place in the same format so that some sort of study planning could be done.
I'm surprised no one has tried to sell your school a system like Blackboard. Is penetration of such systems low outside of the USA? Sounds like there is quite a marketing opportunity there, if you were to develop a competitor to Blackboard. Their software isn't great, it wouldn't be hard to do better, though integrating with the university's existing IT infrastructure could be tricky.
Be warned though, Blackboard basically has their whole system patented, though I think their patent for "using a CMS for school" was recently overturned. The patents may be less important outside of the USA.
If anyone wants to make a competitor to Blackboard, please do. My school uses it and it is terrible: the UI is awful, response time is slow, and professors across the board hate it and prefer to use their own websites to upload files. Shouldn't be too hard to make a better version.
Well I posted about this here, because I have no intention of doing this. I don't really want to work with an entity whose income isn't really determined by the satisfaction of their customers. Finnish universities are supported by the government, there are no tuition fees. The system is nice for us students, but perhaps leads to them not really caring very much if their homepages are hard to use.
I feel so embarrassed for our faculty. I mean they have classes on UI design and usability, yet it's beyond them to make their own pages usable. This is the home page of our logic programming class: http://www.cs.uta.fi/~tn/LOGO_kotisivu_2009.htm I wouldn't mind the yellow background and the all-caps text, if every other course would just have the same information in the same place in the same format so that some sort of study planning could be done.