Educational Portals: More Bang For Your Buck

By Patricia Hendricks, Jennifer Daley, and Johann Sarmiento

A high school senior searches his school website for information about AP tests. He becomes frustrated with dead links and indexing that does not make sense. A working mother needs information about on-site after school care. However, this information is not available from the school website. A Spanish teacher does not have access to communication preferences from parents. He leaves a disciplinary phone message with an older sibling whose deep voice he mistakenly assumes is the father. This mistake increases sibling rivalry and causes friction between the mother and the school.

Though almost every school system in the United States has a website or homepage, these websites are often hard to navigate, contain inaccurate or outdated information, lack basic information, employ inconsistent designs and navigation strategies, and use trite images. Schools and school systems first began creating websites in 1993; most were created simply to claim cybernet presence. Schools have been slow to follow business and higher education in leveraging the communication power of the Internet. School websites could allow parents to set communication preferences. They also could provide students and parents accurate and timely information about school programs and extracurricular activities. And they could allow school administrators to obtain data more effectively and efficiently.

The need for better communication strategies, coupled with the increased demands from mature Internet users, has prompted some K-12 education agencies to consider educational portals. A portal is generally defined as a gateway or starting point to the World Wide Web. However, there are many distinctions between a website and a portal including the ability to customize content, interact with disparate database systems, and contribute content. Educators often mistakenly assume that a collection of resources is a portal. A gateway service (a single starting point) is an important characteristic of a portal, but this functionality alone does not make the website an educational portal. For instance, the Marco Polo site (http://www.marcopolo-education.org/) is an excellent educational website. It organizes high quality lesson plans, student activities, and web resources in a simple navigation structure. Despite its structure and content, Marco Polo is not considered an educational portal because it delivers the same content to all users.

What is a portal?

Like the Marco Polo site, school websites are static; they deliver the same content to all users. Educational portals not only offer a single starting point, a single navigation scheme and information architecture, and a consistent page design; they also consolidate and customize education information, resources, services, and applications for a defined audience (e.g., teachers, students, parents, and community members). In order to be considered an educational portal, the site must supply a customized (single authentication) starting point based on the user's role in the community. Essentially, teachers, students, and parents see different content: that which is most appropriate to their roles, needs, and desires. For instance, students may access personal class schedules, whereas teachers may access their class schedules with authoring privileges. Additionally, educational portals personalize and adapt the interface to discover, track, and allow users to interact with relevant people, applications, and content. In order to contrast a portal's functionality with that of a school website, consider The Beacon School (an alternative high school in Manhattan) and MyUB (University of Buffalo). The Beacon School site (http://beaconschool.org/parents.php) offers individual functionality by allowing parents to sign in and check their child's schedule and homework. The University of Buffalo (www.buffalo.edu/aboutmyub) displays versions for faculty, students, and staff; it allows users to login as they enter the site and delivers information tailored to their needs. Portals help change the organizational structure and communication within an educational community. Strauss (2002) states, "Portals are not a new fad or a new name for something we've already been doing. They significantly change the institutional culture to a service organization."

Another aspect of educational portals is that they provide an access point to multiple heterogeneous data stores including school information databases (e.g., student and teacher information, administrative data, curriculum documents), e-mail, financial accounting systems (e.g., school lunch accounts), and grade books. They also organize information for users to help eliminate information overload. Finally, they facilitate the search for people, organizations, and content in meaningful context. For instance, a well-designed portal allows a teacher to locate high-quality instructional resources; develop a customized lesson plan that uses those resources; publish learning activities to students; and set up an asynchronous discussion space for students, parents, and community members to use while considering the resources. In addition to sending e-mail notifications to a few selected parents notifying them of the activity, it is also possible to receive homework assignments and post grades.

Educational portals rely on specialized software that simultaneously identifies and communicates with specific users. They retrieve and display information from various information systems. In essence, portals help the educational community perform its job more efficiently and effectively.

Why Build a Portal?

Educational portals improve a school's communication services by customizing content based on user roles, organizing and categorizing relevant resources and materials, integrating disparate systems into a single architecture, and allowing users to produce as well as consume content. Corporations build portals to "improve overall knowledge sharing, increase collaboration among different functions and locations of the organization, support the development of communities of practice, facilitate search of previously developed knowledge, get new employees up to speed very quickly, and empower front-line employees" (Terra and Gordon, 2003). Corporations, driven by the "bottom line," build portals to be competitive and to maximize their information technology (IT) investments (e.g., data warehousing, enterprise systems, and infrastructure). In short, corporations build portals because the financial investment will increase their profitability.

Higher education began investigating portals in 2000 for many of the same reasons. However, colleges and universities also wanted to capitalize on the opportunity to change institutional culture. The introduction of technology into university systems often exaggerated the bureaucracies that already existed. Instead of streamlining student processes, disconnected departmental databases exasperated users. Higher education turned to portals to rectify its image and change its culture into a service organization. Katz suggests that the primary purpose for constructing a portal is to sustain positive relationships between [the] institution's stakeholders and the institution (Strauss, 2002). The benefits that corporations and higher education have reached by building portals are also available to K-12 schools.

What are the Technical Aspects of an Educational Portal?

Educational agencies can build their portal "in house" or buy a customized solution from vendors. The technical side of development-if an organization decides on a customized solution instead of a "ready-made" product-includes an incremental process through which prototypes of individual resources are integrated into the portal and evaluated by users. Connecting existing information systems such as transportation, scheduling, or messaging systems into the portal might require working with vendors to implement "conduits" that extract data from such legacy repositories and make it available through the portal in an integrated fashion. To support the dynamic creation and maintenance of the portal's content and allow the participation from all members of the learning community, a Content Management System (CMS) or a database-driven website will be needed.

Readers:: Has your school or district implemented an educational portal? Let us know! E-mail phendric@temple.edu

References

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Terra, J. C. & Gordon, C. (2003). Realizing the promise of corporate portals: Leveraging knowledge for business success. New York: Butterworth-Heinemann. WEB 66 Registry of School Websites (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2003, from http://web66.coled.umn.edu/schools/stats/History.html

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