Educational Portals: More Bang For Your Buck, Part 2

By Patricia Hendricks, Jennifer Daley, and Johann Sarmiento

K-12 education is slowly realizing its place as a service organization in a service dominated economy. Faced with increased expectations, K-12 educators are considering educational portals as a way to increase communication between students, educators, parents, and community members. The educational community is also looking to educational portals to increase the productivity of its processes and procedures. Teachers may use a school or district portal to report student progress, grades, disciplinary actions, IEP documents, and other vital information. Administrators may place and track requests and orders through their web portal. School services such as transportation or meal services can record accounts, transactions, and productivity. Intranets, a set of internal pages accessed from the public educational portal, can increase this kind of productivity. For instance, Nielsen (2003) says of service industries, "For intranets, we know that good design can double employee productivity. This estimate comes from our intranet usability testing, where people using the worst 25% of intranets required 99 hours per year to perform typical employee tasks, whereas people using the best 25% of the intranets accomplished the same tasks in 51 hours per year."

Increased productivity is a vital concern, but administrators and technology coordinators are concerned with documenting the bottom line, the cost of development, and implementation of a web portal.

What Will it Cost?

One of the most important construction considerations is cost; however, the question of cost is only part of the cost/benefit analysis. Educational leaders should consider the bigger questions of whether the portal will be worth the investment and, if so, how long the payback period will be (the payback period is the length of time required for the benefits to exceed the cost).

The most important cost/benefit analysis should be related to the purpose or goal of your portal. For instance, if the main purpose for your portal is to establish customized weekly communication between parents and teachers for at least 80% of the teachers in your school, you should quantify how many teachers currently communicate with parents on a weekly basis. Along with the amount of teacher time that the communication requires, the cost of that communication (e.g., paper, mail), the customization level of the current communication, and the evaluation strategies that are in place to measure the effectiveness of the current communication need to be determined. This benchmark will allow you to analyze the cost/benefit for the new strategy.

Business leaders calculate the cost/benefit analysis by estimating the answers to questions such as

How many people will use the portal? (include both internal and external portal users)
How much labor savings will be realized through the portal? (include increases from new communication as well as more efficient existing communication and productivity increases from fewer steps needed to complete work and fewer errors)
How much cost savings will be realized through the portal? (include reduced resources needed such as paper, reduced mailing and delivery charges, reduced training costs, and reduced procurement costs)
How much will the initial investment cost? (include administrative costs and training costs; software and upgrade costs; hardware costs; technical support; and network costs such as network cards, gateways, hubs, routers, switches, and remote access)
How much will the maintenance of the portal cost? (include subscription costs, training costs, and technical support). Business leaders define return on investment (ROI) as "the ration of the estimated total positive benefits to the estimated total costs. ROI=estimate total positive benefits/estimated total costs" (Collins, 2003).

Is the Portal Effective?

One of the top problems commonly found with portals is impact evaluation (i.e., developing evaluation protocols that will justify the portal's purpose). For example, many corporations believe that corporate portals produce very high returns in investments. However, without concrete metrics, it is often challenging to evaluate these claims. There are several things to consider when evaluating a portal's effectiveness.

First, in the developmental stages, organizations should consider their current practice and identify measures that represent baseline data. Measures of current practice include but are not limited to server logs, use of existing accounts, online surveys of students/teachers/visitors, focus groups, number of documented interactions between parents and school staff, length of time it takes teachers to develop lesson plans, and teachers' ease in locating state standards on the Internet.

Second, systematic evaluation should be tied to the unique purpose and proposed structure of the portal and school. In order to ensure that teachers, parents, students, and staff benefit from an educational portal, an institution should have very clear goals. Goals for an educational portal might include increased communication, improved staff/student knowledge, fostered collaboration, and improved relationships (Terra & Gordon, 2003).

If increasing communication, specifically related to publishing articles as an institutional goal, measurements could compare pre- and post- portal information regarding the time it takes to complete an article, number of people needed, and cost. Other measures used to evaluate educational portals can include measures specific to cost-reduction: reduced clerical work, reduced duplication of documents, less paper flow in the office and between third parties, and reduced telecommunications costs (phone bills and private networks). Measures regarding productivity can include reduced time spent looking for information, reduced time to upload (publish) or distribute documents (measured through surveys), reduced time to train employees (especially getting new employees up to speed), reduced time spent in menial activities, and reduced time spent preparing lesson plans (Terra & Gordon, 2003).

Third, evaluation information and protocols should ideally be used to improve the flow of information to all users. For example, universities often collect statistics on the frequency of instances in which portal users found the portal content useless or outdated. The universities then gather evaluation data-formative and summative, external and internal-from the help desk services regarding portal content and specific complaints. This evaluation, in turn, leads to changes in the content available on the portal and from the university help desks to improve the flow of information.

Overall, portal assessments should consider goals and objectives, content, pedagogy, ease of use, and cost. Core questions to ask when evaluating portal effectiveness should include

Is the portal server in operation, almost always, when needed?
Is there technical support available by e-mail or phone?
Does the content meet the curriculum standards of the county or district?
Is the content correct and up-to-date?
Is the information useful?
Is the information easy to access?
Is pertinent information grouped collectively on a page and organized into logical sections? (Jackson, 2000).

In conclusion, educational portals help the educational community perform their jobs more efficiently and effectively by providing a gateway to information, resources, services, and applications on the World Wide Web tailored to the user (student, teacher, parent, or community member). The portal allows educators to offer all the educational information housed within the school system to its users with one navigation scheme.

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

References

Collins, H. (2003). Enterprise knowledge portals. New York: Amacom.

Jackson, G. (2000, May/June). How to evaluate educational software and websites. In TechKnowLogia. Retrieved May 2003, from http://ipdweb.np.edu.sg/lt/jul00/evaluate.pdf

Nielson, J. (2003). Do productivity increases generate economic gains? Retrieved May 12, 2003, from http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030317.html

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

Resources

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Bradley, G. (2000, September 1). Education portals: Weaving your way wisely through the web. In e Schoolnews . Retrieved April 2003, from http://www.eschoolnews.com

Brown, A. III (in press). Instant CMS for schools: Emergence of the authoring divide. Retrieved April 23, 2003, from http://www.temple.edu/martec/technobrief/index.html

Bushweller, K. (2000, November). Gateways to the internet [Electronic version]. American School Board Journal, 28–31.

Chen, O. (2002). Portal implementation hindsight. Retrieved April 25, 2003, from http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/ra/EDU02123.ram

Ethridge, R., Hadden, C., & Smith, M. (2000). Building a personalized education portal. Educause Quarterly. Retrieved April 26, 2003, from http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EQM0031.pdf

Fleischman, J. (2002, January 1). Web portals: Should you build or buy? In eSchoolnews. Retrieved May 2003, from: http://www.eschoolnews.com

McKenzie, J. (1997) Why in the world wide web? Retrieved April 2003, from http://www.fno.org/mar97/why.html

Nora, C. (2003). Resolve to improve your web communications for 2003. In eSchoolnews. Retrieved May 3, 2003, from http://www.eschoolnews.com

Olsen, F. (2002). The power of portals. Chronicle of Higher Education, 48, 32–34.

Sarmiento, J. (2001). Online portals in education. Retrieved May 2, 2003, from http://www.temple.edu/martec/technobrief/tbrief9.html

Sistek-Chandler, C. (2000). Learning portals for k-12 education and beyond. Retrieved April 4, 2003, from http://www.convergemag.com

Strauss, R. (2002) It’s a bird, it's a plane! It's a . . .portal In Strauss, R. (Eds.), Web Portals in Higher Education (pp. 230–245). San Francisco, CA: Educause and NACUBO.