Campus Websites
All Roads Lead to Portal
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.”
Also critical was getting campus community
input, which she encouraged via
tool demonstrations: “One faculty member
told me the portal had to be easy to
adopt; they had to be able to learn [to
work with] it in the first few weeks before
the semester started because that’s when
all their work got done.” And a particularly
popular feature was the ability to
feed alerts to students when they hit the
portal page. One faculty member asked
Bradder, “Can you have that working by
tomorrow? I have something I forgot to
tell my class about the exam on Friday….”
And when Bradder asked student
government representatives, “On a scale
of one to 10, how cool do you think this
is?” they responded, “13.” The following
day, she received a plethora of e-mail
from students volunteering to test the
new system and give feedback—even
over the summer.
Bradder hopes to introduce the portal
to students returning in the fall—“a perfect
rollout time,” she maintains. “We
might not have all the services. But to
have the students, faculty, and staff collaborating
all in the same space—that
will make it a powerful communication
vehicle for us.”
Building Portlet Power
While Simpson College is just embarking
on its portal journey, Pomona College
(CA) launched its portal process about
five years ago. The college was just moving
off a legacy administrative system
and onto Jenzabar for
enterprise resource planning (ERP) operations,
when officials realized that the
same vendor offered a portal that integrated
with the system. According to CIO
Ken Pflueger, the ERP and portal implementations
were a joint undertaking of
the five undergraduate colleges that make
up the Claremont Colleges. They were
seeking a way to accomplish cross registration
among the undergraduate students,
which had become crucial. (For
instance, although Pomona has about
1,550 full-time students, it has another
1,300 students from the other four colleges
taking one or more classes.)
Also attractive was the ability of Jenzabar
to work with portlets; applications
typically written in Java, which run within
a portal channel and can extend the
functionality of the basic portal platform
in unique ways. Pflueger’s team has since
created a portlet that allows staff members
to make audio recordings of each
new freshman pronouncing his name, as
he arrives for freshman orientation.
Those MP3 files are then linked to student
pictures, so that “when faculty members
go into the portal to view class lists,
they can look at student pictures and hear
the students pronounce their names,”
Pflueger explains. Currently, the function
is available only to faculty and key
administrators like the dean, who relies
on the portlet to prepare him for graduation,
so he doesn’t fumble with names.
And because students requested the ability for course syllabi to be made
available outside of the course management
system (CMS)—so that individuals
not already enrolled in the courses
can view the syllabi too—now when a
department assistant types up a syllabus,
a portlet enables simultaneous publishing
to a syllabus site within the portal.
Podcast Portal Mania
INDIANA UNIVERSITY, a founding member of
Sakai (www.sakaiproject.org), has announced that
it will make available three different mechanisms
for publishing and accessing podcasts by the end
of 2007, one of which involves building its own
podcasting portal to allow community access for
podcasts (and not just those that are courserelated,
which will be offered through the school’s
Oncourse open source course management site).
The portal, expected to go live May 1, will give podcast
creators a way to store and register audio
files via a single website. Though the services
offered through Oncourse require authentication,
the podcasting portal will be publicly available.
Elizabeth Van Gordon, director of learning technology
operations, says the contents will be searchable,
although not all podcasts may be
downloadable. Her group is still sorting things out.
In any event, she says, “This is one more way
of making university content available 24/7, and
it complements other initiatives designed to
meet the needs of a mobile and wired population
of learners.” And while she agrees that a
recording can’t substitute for the classroom
experience, “We’re hearing that students listen to
podcasts when they miss class, or when they
study for exams. They also say they feel the podcast
helps them when they don’t understand the
notes they took.”
Sample publicly available IU podcasts at:
Still another portlet automates the
college’s voting process for “faculty of
the year” awards. Once the nominating
process is complete and the bios for the
nominees are posted, seniors can enter
the portal to vote. The portlet then tallies
votes and rank-orders them to establish
the winners.
The Jenzabar platform also enables
students to tap into the career development
portion of the campus portal and
search the alumni/development offices’
directory of graduates, to make contact
with professionals working in the fields
they’re interested in learning more about.
And though it’s common for students to
be able to access information about
financial aid through their campus portal,
Pomona goes one step further and
offers an option to parents, so that they
can gain access to the portal in order to
view a modified version of their child’s
bill, and get information about making
payments online.
Pflueger continues to focus on the integration
of systems and the blending of
data, even though he admits that his team
still hasn’t tackled some of the “harder
pieces.” For instance, they’ve haven’t yet
figured out how to allow faculty to use the
gradebook feature of the school’s Sakai CMS and have
that information transmitted up to the
Jenzabar applications. Currently, grades
need to be entered twice: once in Sakai
for students to view, and again in the ERP
system so that grades can be uploaded to
the Registrar’s office. He’d like to see this
process better managed via the portal.
Pushing Paradigm Shift
At Huntington Junior College (WV),
with 800 full-time students and 50 to 75
part-time enrollees, the focus is on
health- and business-related education.
One popular Huntington program, for
example, trains students to become court
reporters and broadcast captioners. But
once that program became available in
distance-ed mode, says Cathy Snoddy,
the school’s assistant director, she recognized
the need for a tool that would allow
students to have access to Huntington
24/7—a challenge, with an administrative
staff of only 12 people. Yet, the school
was determined to offer students greater
flexibility while still maintaining its oneon-
one approach. So in 2005, Snoddy
requested that the school beta-test a new
portal system from Campus Management, which
was already supplying the institution with
other applications. The year of testing,
says the assistant director, was the easiest
part of the process.
Tougher was going after faculty, staff,
and student buy-in. Snoddy began at the
administrative level: “If we didn’t overcome
their objections, we wouldn’t have
the financing,” she explains. To grab
administrators’ attention, she performed
random interviews of students, particularly
those enrolled in computer information
services and real-time reporting
classes. She then provided their feedback
to the administrative staff—along with a
carefully conceived rollout plan. Buy-in
followed on the heels of feedback results.
She learned, for instance, that academic
advising and registration typically used
to take three to four weeks to accomplish,
and involved scheduling and face-to-face
meetings with the entire student population.
The advisers would sit at their desks
“never moving” as students filed through,
recalls Snoddy. But using the portal, students
could submit their proposed schedules
to their advisers for review, and then
schedule their appointments whenever
they wished, handling class registration
online. As for the advisers, they now
review each student’s schedule and make
adjustments without feeling as rushed,
because “They don’t have a line of 50 kids
waiting to see them,” she explains. “The
portal helps us manage the time without
losing that key advisory process.”
3 Dreaded Portal Mistakes—and How to Avoid Them
- “It’s as boring as banking information; the portal is treated as a second-class project.”
- “They slap a front end on a back end they’ve already got, without rethinking how
things need to reconnect. That results in a Frankenstein of technology—one thing
glued to another.”
- “They spend a year ‘evaluating’ the project, then decide they need to spend a
million dollars. By then, the industry has changed, the technology has changed, and
the users are more sophisticated.”
How to prevent these three disasters? Lance Merker, CEO, OmniUpdate, advises:
- Survey your users. “There’s no student today who hasn’t been forced to log in to a
portal. But don’t survey the seniors; talk to the freshmen and even high school
seniors, because they’re the ones you’ll be serving.”
- Choose a product built on open standards. “Look for a system that is readily pluggable
with other systems, whether that’s through LDAP or other wonderful APIs.”
- Think strategically, but act in a micro manner. “Get the thing deployed in one
semester; in one month even, but not six months. Get it out fast.”
One last thought from Merker: For campus portals to become truly successful,
they’ll eventually need to partner with MySpace and Friendster to engage students [see this month’s Seen & Heard, page 6 of our magazine].
For their part, Huntington faculty use
the portal to access their virtual classrooms,
a function traditionally handled
by a CMS. Instructors can log in to a
given course, view the student roster,
upload documents, and post grades.
To get current students used to the new
portal, Snoddy and the staff held hourlong
orientation sessions, one-on-one and
in groups. New students learn about the
portal and receive passwords at orientation.
The assistant director reports that even though the school prods students to
use the portal to schedule meetings with
staff and faculty, check on financial aid,
request address changes, check GPA status,
and post resumes, students now
actively “market” the portal to their peers.
Still, it’s important to know thy user,
says Snoddy. For example, while social
networking isn’t part of Huntington’s
portal plan (“Our students are older and
have other social ties,” she explains), the
portal is the students’ introduction to a
wider world. “Our state has low computer
ownership,” the administrator points
out. “We’re preparing our students to go
out there and to work within a worldwide
business environment. The experiences
they have here—using the portal to communicate,
to schedule, to manage their
own lives—are the types of skills they’re
going to need in a business environment.”
Evolving the Portal
Ruth Gill is the manager of application
support for Montgomery College (MD),
a large and diverse multi-campus community
college with 23,000 full-time
and 17,000 continuing-ed students from
170 countries around the world. Not surprisingly,
Gill gauges the success of her
campus’ portal by the number of daily
logins it gets. On a Tuesday during the
first week of spring classes in 2007, that
number hit 23,707—up from 5,866 on
the second day of the same academic
week in the previous year.
At the time the MyMC portal—originally
based on Campus Pipeline’s portal
application (Campus Pipeline was later
acquired by SunGard)—went live, “We wanted to start
really small,” Gill remembers. That
involved providing a front end to the campus’
SCT Banner ERP system (also
acquired by SunGard). “We thought: If
we can get single sign-on and get students
to use the portal for registration and some
administrative tasks, we’ve really done
something.”
The second phase of the portal evolution
was all about better communication
tools. With three “different flavored”
campuses fairly distant geographically,
“We wanted a feeling of community,”
says Gill, “and we tried to accomplish it
through the portal.” The key, Gill
explains, was the content—a challenge
then and still a challenge now. “We don’t
have a magic formula for that,” she
admits, confiding that in the early days of
the portal, “We had to beg people to
write. Though implementation was easy,
the college community didn’t understand
what we were trying to do. Buy-in took a
while, even though the campus librarians
have been major supporters of the site and
a ready source of content.” One portal
team member is still serving as content
coordinator: She offers information about
getting channels published on the portal,
then sorts through content, culling out the
inappropriate. But Gill believes there
should be a dedicated portal editor.
The current generation of MyMC,
built on SunGard’s Luminis Platform,
brands the college as much as possible.
“Every time you log in, you get a different
picture,” says Gill, referencing the
photos of campus community members.
And the portal offers federated searching.
For instance, users can search all
online databases at the school, via rolebased
tabs for the library personnel, faculty,
students, etc.
Portal governance is handled by a
MyMC advisory team of 18, consisting of
faculty, administration, and staff. While
students aren’t part of the advisory board
(“It’s hard to get them to attend meetings,”
says Gill), her team actively solicits
feedback from them, and current
topics of discussion revolve around the
possible addition of blogs and podcasts.
Recently, the college was searching
for a new president, so Gill’s team set up
a secure area specifically for the board
of trustees and selection committee,
where they could share documents and
schedules related to the process. “We
got really positive feedback from that,”
she reports. “Now the board of trustees
understands what they funded!”
When Is Development Too Aggressive?
Another SunGard Luminis client school,
Loyola Marymount University (CA),
has unfortunately not enjoyed a smooth
route to success. While VP for IT Erin
Griffin certainly sees the value of the school’s portal, the current implementation
has been plagued by headaches, and
she admits, “To a certain extent, we’ve
made some of our own problems by taking
a more sophisticated approach to it.”
Relieving Inquiry Inundations
GOT A PORTAL, but too many admissions questions
coming in through it? When Clemson University’s (SC) freshman applications jumped
by more than 42 percent in one admissions cycle,
answering the sudden influx of daily inquiries
became overwhelming for admissions staff, and
administrators hunted quickly for a solution that
could ride on top of the university portal, automate
quick, accurate responses 24/7, and yet still
maintain a personal touch with students. They
also wanted to allow staff to customize and modify
answers daily, and needed a system that would
track the questions and their frequency to provide
the university with key feedback on student/
parent needs and inquiry patterns.
Via Hobsons’ EMT Answer,
admissions staffers say they were able to customize
content for 90 different topic areas, providing
automated answers to the most common
admissions inquiries (FAQs). Now, students and
parents receive fast, detailed, customized
responses, and staff can evaluate nightly backend
reports to glean key metrics. An added
inquiry-routing component prompts portal visitors
who can’t find resolution through the FAQs to contact
staff via an e-mail inquiry form, then sorts the
e-mails and delegates them to appropriate
staffers for personalized response. Clemson offi-
cials say they’ve fielded more than 230,000
inquiries via the system.
The portal, ManeGate (after the
school’s mascot, a lion), originally went
live in August 2005. “There wasn’t a lot
of enthusiasm for it,” said Griffin. “There
was a sense that it should be a grassroots
movement, and that everyone would put
content up, left and right. But the content
wasn’t compelling, wasn’t refreshed regularly,
and there was way too much of it.”
A year later, the portal was redesigned to
remove much of the textual content and
add more graphics. The problem now? It
still has “too much of a grownup feel,”
says Griffin. “Students find the content
less than compelling.”
As part of the redesign, Griffin’s team
also shut off access to campus applications,
in order to drive students, faculty,
and staff through the portal to gain
entry to those same programs. In addition,
new functionality was introduced,
including the introduction of Xythos Digital Locker, a
web-based document management system
branded LionShare by the school.
In the past, Griffin explains, “We
couldn’t provide the students with storage
space on university servers. Consequently,
there would be 30 kids in a class, each
trying to load his or her file on a classroom
computer. But Xythos has been a
key reason that people are now coming to
the portal,” she says, pointing to the
100MB allotted per student and 200MB
per faculty or staff member.
Also, by establishing single sign-on
to the portal, the school can now grant
access to the Blackboard CMS and
SunGard Banner system (nicknamed
“PROWL”), for self-service operations.
“We call it the one-stop corner,” says
Griffin. Users can request a book from
the library, obtain a parking pass,
change a username and password, check
the status of financial aid, tune in to
iTunesLMU for course lectures and
information podcasts, and more. Eventually,
says the VP, the campus hopes to
add an ID management system to give
functionality access to a larger collection
of constituents such as alumni, parents,
and members of the local
community.
But first, there are problems to iron
out. Among them, the inability to write
portlets because Luminis didn’t support
the Java Portlet standard JSR 168. (That
support surfaced with Luminis 4.0,
released in March 2007.) And there
have been authentication glitches and
integration problems with Blackboard
and with Banner, especially as the
school implemented its latest Banner
upgrade. Recently, Griffin’s team discovered
incompatibility problems for
people trying to use adaptive technologies
in Blackboard; she suspects they’re
caused by ManeGate.
Granted, says Griffin, “We will take
some responsibility for the fact that we
have been very aggressive in how we’ve
deployed the tool; we pretty much
stretch the envelope of what you can do
with Luminis. But we’ve had a long
series of missteps that have caused a
tremendous amount of frustration
around here.” The portal, she sighs, is
still “a work in progress.”
For its part, during a meeting late last
year, SunGard cautioned the school to
perform testing before upgrading to a
new version of Blackboard. “The way
that Blackboard is doing integration
today has been problematic in some
cases,” says SunGard Senior VP of Services
Brad Rucker. When Blackboard
puts out a release, SunGard has to wait for
that release to hit general availability in
order to integrate it with Luminis, he
notes. Where integration is involved,
says Rucker, the key to success in a major
upgrade is a two-stage process: 1) make
sure the campus has current upgrades
for all the products to be integrated; and
2) run through scripted tasks to make
sure all major functions are retested
before they’re released into production.
Is there a solution in sight for Loyola
Marymount? “We’re struggling to learn a
new communication model,” Griffin concludes.
“There’s too much information
for our 20th-century minds to assimilate.
We’re just going to have to wait until the
current generation gets older and empowered.”
Then, hopefully, she concedes,
“They will be able to manage this in a
way that we have not been able to.”
::WEBEXTRA :: Case Study: Student feedback
helps improve one university’s portal
design.:: Consider an open source portal
solution.
