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All Roads Lead to Portal
5/1/2007
In the journey toward ultimate campus portal evolution, there are any number of routes to take and, sometimes, roads that should remain less traveled.
Heard the latest? Portals are taking off on campuses nationwide. According to
Campus Computing 2006, the Campus Computing Project’s survey of 540
two- and four-year public and private colleges and universities across the US, portal deployment for four-year
public residential universities jumped from 28 percent to 74 percent of responding institutions between the
2002 and 2006 academic years; from 20 percent to 38 percent for private four-year universities; and from 23 percent to 43 percent
for community colleges. Yet, as more and more campuses buy into the promise of single sign-on and
integration of information and services, needs and realities of implementation can diverge. To get a better
sense of the “state of the portal” in higher ed, it’s important to look at the differing stages of maturity and
the wide range of technology choices in the portal journey.
‘Discovering’ the Ideal Communication Vehicle
Kelley Bradder is CIO and VP of information services for 2,000-student, three-campus Simpson College (IA). She has very specific ideas about how she’ll know whether her institution’s portal initiative is a success, but claims that will be when the tool becomes transparent to faculty who use the portal to communicate with their students, and when students use the space to collaborate with faculty and learn—and “not because it’s the new technology gadget on campus.” She admits that the school is still in the midst of a lengthy discovery process, however.
“Back ‘when,’” she recalls, “portals were really inexpensive as long as you allowed advertising on them. But I couldn’t figure out how that would work in a small college; there just weren’t that many eyeballs to view advertising, to promote ad revenue.” The dot-com era came and went, and that approach to funding portals evaporated, but Bradder continued to evolve the campus portal. “It made a lot of sense,” she notes, “but as we added more systems, usernames, and passwords, confusion grew.”
For a time, she considered the open source uPortal, yet, “For a small college with limited staff, supporting an open source product didn’t seem to be the correct fit,” she says. At the time, she even explored using it and bringing on another company to support the open source portal.
Now, the campus is planning to move to the next major release of Datatel’s ActiveCampus Portal, which runs on top of Microsoft Office’s SharePoint Server 2007—a suite of services that provide content management, enterprise search, and collaboration features. The new release from Datatel, due to ship in July, will leverage information drawn from the school’s implementation of Blackboard’s WebCT v.4.1 and Datatel’s human resources management program.
Bradder was drawn to ActiveCampus for its mobility features, plus single sign-on and customization capabilities. “It combines with web functions like wikis and blogging, and it has a social networking feel,” she explains. “It also incorporates RSS feeds, which allow users to move things around on the page, and gives them the ability to subscribe to news, calendars, and events. You’re not pushing information,” she maintains; “they’re choosing their own information. That’s critical to a second-generation portal.”
Portal Maturity
How Do You Know You’ve Arrived?
JOHN SAVARESE, consulting principal for Edutech International and a frequent contributor to Campus Technology, reminds clients that they should consider their campus portals as part of a larger vision. “You’re not just building services,” he advises, “but a relationship between the institution and all those it serves.”
As student populations grow and automated self-service becomes the norm, the information systems the school implements actually become the “personality modules” of the institution. “If the personality module fails—if we can’t remember who you are or don’t remember that you’re married—we’re not convincingly there,” he maintains, and “it weakens the sense of having a real relationship.”
So, how do you know if you’re really there? According to Savarese, one of the tests of a mature portal implementation should be: “How many people do you have to tell when you change your address, change your name, or change your marital status? If you have to tell multiple people, that’s disheartening.”
Another concrete sign of portal maturity, says Savarese, is to empower the person receiving a message to choose the medium for delivery, rather than leave the choice to the person sending it. “Let’s say there’s an urgent communication from the school to the student: ‘Your financial aid payment hasn’t come through because you haven’t signed the forms, and that’s going to put a hold on your registration for courses, so come in and sign the forms.’ How should that happen? It ought to happen the way students want it to happen,” says Savarese. “The portal should offer, ‘How do you want urgent messages delivered to you?’ Then students can indicate a text-message or e-mail address, or request an automated voicemail message to a particular number.” Few schools have reached that level of unified messaging.
But, says Savarese, “The most important thing is to enable a student to plan his academic career—degree audit, or degree requirements—with ‘what-iffing.’ If at 11 pm, a student tells her mother she’s fallen in love with math and is going to change majors, and her mother responds, ‘Well, how many years will it take you to graduate?’ the answer should be, ‘Let me look at this online degree audit and find out.’ You don’t want the answer to be, ‘Well, I’ll find out tomorrow when the offices are open.’ “
What’s happening here,” says the analyst, “is a whole revisualization of what an institution is. Institutions now have students and faculty all over the world. The portal is really a shorthand instrument for making an institution accessible across time and space.”
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