September 2000 Volume 14, No. 1 The Portal's Progress: A Gateway for Access, Information, and Learning Communities David L. Eisler, Weber State University Campus portals have evolved from static campus Web pages to a comprehensive interface for accessing university resources, community groups, and interactive learning environments. The campus portal is a hot topic on many college and university campuses. While still in an evolutionary state, university portals provide a new interface between colleges and constituent groups, provide new mechanisms to organize campuses, and offer the promise of new ways to create communities of learners. The concept of information portals originated with search engines and interfaces like Yahoo, Excite, and Netscape. These companies created horizontal portals to provide information on a broad array of subjects that could be personalized by users. Next came vertical portals, which provided information on a single subject, closely related subjects, or information that was directed at particular groups of users. The combination of these two portal approaches with the integration of campus-specific information creates the campus portal, a new personalized and customized interface for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and visitors to communicate with the university and with each other. Consider the possibilities that are now available on a user's desktop. Prospective students can track applications for admission, scholarships, and financial aid; attend a virtual orientation; visit with an advisor; register for classes; and pay their bills, all through a single interface. Students can see copies of their current schedules, check their degree progress, discover whether their latest papers have been graded, determine which computers are free in the nearest lab, be reminded that materials are due in the library, chat with friends, read announcements on clubs or special interests, and see headlines or sports results on campus, regional, or national levels. Faculty will be able to see class rolls with student photos, post class announcements, submit grades electronically, check budget balances, and track the status of their latest travel vouchers. Alumni and donors will be able to keep up with classmates, stay in touch with campus events, and follow favorite projects. Many of these activities are possible on campuses today, but certainly not through the convenience of a single interface. A campus portal may be defined as a single integrated point for useful and comprehensive access to information, people, and processes. While portals have a rapidly evolving set of features and characteristics, they can be described as both personalized and customized user interfaces providing users with access to both internal and external information. Portals can be used for a variety of activities which generally fit into three main categories-gateways to information, points of access for constituent groups, and community/ learning hubs. Campus Web Presence Evolves An effective campus portal requires the interaction of a series of functionalities to provide the access, information, and interactivity described above. The following list describes some of the many features portals may include.
Looking at this complex list, it is easy to understand the potential technological challenges portals can represent for campuses, because connecting portal software with internal data sources is not an easy or simple process. There are many routes to creating a campus portal. Readers are encouraged to visit some of the sites below to experience the wealth of information available and the ease with which it can be accessed.
Learning, or Access, Portals Examples of learning portals include multinational efforts, such as TeleCampus from the New Brunswick Learning (http://telecampus.edu/learners/); regional efforts, such as Southern Regional Education Board Electronic Campus (http://www.srec.sreb.org/); and campus-based efforts, like WSU Online from Weber State University (http://wsuonline.weber.edu/). The TeleCampus is truly a remarkable collection of online learning offerings from around the world. Courses may be selected by subject, by words contained in the title or description, or by institution. Pop-up windows provide more complete course information including cost, analysis of the offering, and links back to the offering campus to register for the class. The "Before You Begin" section includes valuable information on unrecognized accrediting agencies and unaccredited institutions. The site is not personalized to the student, but provides chat capability and a wealth of useful information for distance learners. Course and Program Portals Some learning portals are Web sites that provide a combination of courses, collaboration, and community. These are frequently designed to provide training to individuals or industry, are set up as e-commerce offerings, and serve as aggregators of course offerings. An excellent collection of links to these sites is available from Dr. Brandon Hall (http://www.internetconnect.net/~bhall/portals/). Other commercial versions of learning portals are designed to create communities of learners. An example of this is Blackboard.com (http://www.blackboard.com/; choose from the communities on the right hand side of the page). At Blackboard, learning communities are organized by discipline and have separate sections for faculty and students. An interesting category of learning portal is institution-independent and aimed directly at students. Study 24-7.com (www.study247.com/home.html) and Tutor.com (http://tutor.com/) are two examples of this approach. Study 24-7.com has attracted attention through its offer to purchase class notes and is certainly an interesting approach to encourage student interaction and study. The
Path Ahead David L. Eisler is provost of Weber State University. He is currently working on a portal project linking the ASSCU provosts and the TLT Group in a new learning environment. Dr. Eisler will lead sessions in the featured track on Campus Portals at the Syllabus Fall 2000 conference in the Boston area. deisler@weber.edu
Syllabus Case Study: It all started, as Dr. Gideon Burton puts it, "innocently enough." A professor and scholar of rhetoric at Brigham Young University, Burton originally turned to Web pages and the hyperlinking of data as a way to make notes to himself, to organize the vast terminology of historical rhetoric from antiquity to the Renaissance. Three years later, Burton has added another dimension to his role of scholar-professor-he is now Web master of a widely known and award-winning discipline portal on rhetoric: Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric. The development of Burton's portal was also, in part, an outgrowth of his effort to improve his teaching, making an extremely complex subject easier for his students to grasp. Like educators everywhere, he had printed handouts of definitions and explanations, but still the terminology was confusing and overwhelming to his students. This struggle with the terminology seemed to be obscuring the primary functions of the larger field of rhetoric-not being able to see the forest for the trees. This would eventually become a metaphor for the Silva portal, where the "forest," "trees," and "flowers" of rhetoric inhabit separate frames on the same screen. Burton himself had appreciated the simple charts of "rhetoric in a nutshell" provided by Edward Corbett's Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, and used this print model as a starting point for his Web site. He discovered that the Web environment could accommodate both the simplicity of Corbett's visual as well as the details of rhetorical terminology. "Through hyperlinks," Burton explains, "a reader could travel readily back and forth between the overview (forest), and the details (trees)." Burton discovered that the multi-frame ability of the Web was actually superior to print media for organizing material simply. Web page organizational capabilities, he says, "accommodate well an esoteric subject and make it more accessible" to multiple audiences. Thus, when colleagues at academic conferences asked for more scholarly details and sources, Burton integrated a scholarly apparatus to accompany the more general information. While Silva is still simply organized, each frame addresses a different set of learning needs, a different audience. The frame on the left, trees, includes a limited set of choices and encourages the reader to "stay here so you won't be overwhelmed." The frame on the right includes a more daunting list of rhetorical terms; when a reader clicks on one entry, the term's home page comes into the center frame and includes comparative Greek, Latin, and English terms; etymologies; and the Greek in its original alphabet. At the bottom of every page appear citations to the primary texts where the particular term is defined or discussed. "Though
Web-based scholarship remains an oxymoron for many," Burton confides, this
collegial interest in Silva resulted in his taking his Web site "more
seriously as a scholarly endeavor precisely because others began to do
so." Today, he comments, "My academic Web site has complemented and
supplemented the professional meetings I regularly attend." For instance,
a professor of Russian at the University of Tartu in Estonia employs Silva
in teaching Russian stylistics and has, with Burton's permission,
translated the site into Russian at a mirror site. Though Burton's experience in assembling an overarching Web site has benefited his research, teaching, and scholarship, he warns that these benefits have come "at a certain price." It is important, Burton acknowledges, that faculty go into Web site construction "with their eyes open." The first drawback to the medium, of course, is time. "The creation of a Web site takes a great deal of time," Burton says, "much of which is not spent in the areas for which a scholar is trained." Burton himself learned to manipulate HTML, progressing from his original Web site Rhetoric for Rookies, a simple one-page site with links to definitions and explanations in other parts of the page, to Silva, the much more complex and satisfying multi-framed site he uses today. Another part of the time sink of portal creation, according to Burton, is the siren call of the huge project. It is simply far too easy to take on a project that is too large, Burton cautions. Any project involving graphics, database preparation, or multimedia requires significant underwriting and "like all electronic publishing, can become something more akin to the collaborative and costly production of a movie than to typical scholarly work if one indulges all the tempting possibilities of this new medium." Finally, Burton notes that Web site and portal creation "is hard to sell to one's academic peers as a legitimate scholarly activity." While this is changing, Burton finds it ironic that on his campus "facility in Web publishing has become a criterion for assessing faculty candidates…but faculty already in place (at least in the humanities) are told not to rely on Web publishing for rank and status advancement." It is possible, Burton concludes, that one can be "penalized for being on the cutting edge." Nevertheless, Burton says, "with these caveats in mind, I urge scholars to bring their knowledge into the electronic environment. Many significant uses of the electronic environment have yet to be discovered, and along the way the very pitfalls one faces can provide a stimulus for rethinking one's research and reframing its use in the classroom." For more information contact Dr. Gideon Burton, Brigham Young University. http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm Resources: Choden,
Audrey, "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Learning Portals," http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/training_and_development/41704
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