My fiance is taking an introductory programming class at the College of DuPage. She enjoys the material, and the teacher is really cool as well. The college is trying hard to stay up-to-date with technology and they employed the CampusCruiser system to provide both students and teachers with a digital classroom. In addition to being just a posting board for course materials, CampusCruiser is also an emailing system. It's a typical web-based email, which also supports reading of third party POP3 and IMAP accounts. It's cool because you can read all your email in one place. Unfortunately, the converse is not true! CampusCruiser is keeping students' email hostage - it is not possible (at least I was not able to figure out how) to read it using an external email client.
I find this kind of practice unacceptable. All colleges my fiance and I attended, did let us (and even encouraged) access our mail outside of the college website. A quick look at the CampusCruiser homepage reveals that the system allows POP3 access for staff. Why not for students?! I hope that College of DuPage will learn from GMail, which recently added IMAP access, and will enable its students to take control of their own emails.