Part II: Are Portals Dead? And More

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Part II: Are Portals Dead? And More

1/28/2004

By Terry Calhoun

As J'e continues his report from last week, he moves from the more purely technological realm into one of definitions and functionality, based on a site-by-site evaluation of 172 college and university Web sites. Along with other observations, he draws the conclusion that "portalization" may already have reached its zenith and predicts that many Web sites already are or will be calling themselves by "portalized" names of some sort, but really aren't and won't be true portals. Enjoy!

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J'e St Sauver
University of Oregon Computing Center

University "Portal" Web Sites

A few years ago, universities were under tremendous commercial pressure (as well as substantial peer pressure from those who'd already jumped on the portal bandwagon) to move to a portal model for their institutional home pages. So far, the hype hasn't resulted in much real "portal product," and likely won't.

Of course, one of the first problems universities faced was figuring out just what a portal actually is. A good definition has always been elusive, but there was fair consensus that a portal would:

· require users to log in (a process which would allow users to customize the portal to best reflect their interests-interests which could then be recalled during subsequent logins);

· somehow be inclusive enough to act as the user's default start page, having everything the user wanted or needed; and

· tightly integrate with existing administrative systems and existing teaching and learning systems (such as Blackboard or WebCT).

In some cases, portals were also billed as a way for universities to raise revenue via the sale of online advertising. Universities were told that soon "everyone" would have a true portalized home page. "Portalize or die," they were effectively told.

University administrators were also told that the straightforward secure Web sites they'd been deploying, sites which allowed students to perform administrative tasks online such as registering for classes or looking up grades, were not portals. Students would not routinely log in to Web sites of that sort (unless they had a specific administrative task to accomplish), and it was extremely unlikely that anyone would make one of these secure administrative Web sites their default home page.

So now that two or three years have gone by, where are all the university portals? Has the portalization of higher education actually occurred? No.

Not one university in our study sample has a portalized home page, and only 36 schools (about 20 percent) even have a link to a Web portal from the school's default home page, often via a not-very-prominent link. In other cases, an institutional portal may have been marginalized to the point where it is only being targeted at a smaller audience, such as current students.

We believe that university portals are currently at their zenith, and as time g'es by, those universities that did experimentally deploy a portal will most likely retire that model and return to a simpler functional model.