Volume, September 13, 2000
"Portals in Higher Education" by Michael Looney cofounder and former President of GoCampus, Inc., and Peter Lyman, Professor in the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley, Educause Review, July/August 2000, p. 28
"At the most basic level, portals gather a variety of useful information resources into a single, 'one-stop' Web page, helping the user to avoid being overwhelmed by 'infoglut'or feeling lost on the Web. But since no two people have the same interests, portals allow users to customize their information sources by selecting and viewing only the information they find personally useful. Some portals also let you personalize your portal by including private information (such as your stock portfolio or checking-account balance). Put simply, an institution's portal is designed to make an individual's Web experience more efficient and thereby make the institution as a whole more productive and responsive." (p. 30)
"The most common type of portal is a consumer portal. The two most popular consumer portals are AOL (http://www.aol.com) and Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com)." (p. 30) "Another form of differentiation is a community portal, in which information is aggregated, edited, and organized around a specific topic." (p. 30) A community portal for higher education is College Club (http://www.collegeclub.com), which markets directly to undergraduate students." (p. 31) "Vertical portals are similar to community portals but are generally structured by a particular vendor around a specialized business theme." (p. 31) "Among higher education service companies, Blackboard (http://www.blackboard.com) has integrated a portal around its course-management service, and PeopleSoft is offering a portal front-end for its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system." (p. 31) "Enterprise portals are intended to assist employees to be more efficient and productive by centralizing access to needed data services-for example, competitive information, manufacturing and accounting data, 401K information, and other human relations data." (p. 31) "Since campuses are often more complex and heterogeneous than corporations, we feel that the enterprise portal model gives higher education institutions the greatest flexibility to meet the diverse need and constituents on and off campus." (p. 31)
"As e-commerce investment has exploded, the entrepreneurial world has looked around the Internet and realized that the most connected population with the best commercial demographics is in higher education." (p. 31) "…although campuses do not often think of themselves in terms of their 'brand' or in terms of marketing demographics, higher education possesses extraordinary assets for e-commerce and should not give these assets to a college.com too cheaply or too quickly." (p. 32)
"So should a campus develop a portal? Increased efficiency alone suggests yes, but there are other benefits that make a personalized campus portal not only desirable but imperative. We believe that the value of a portal to a campus is that it can be used to engage constituent groups, empower them with access to information resources and communication tools, and ultimately retain them by providing a more encompassing sense of membership in an academic community." (p. 33) "The University of Washington has developed MyUW (http://myuw.Washington.edu)." (p. 33) "In strategic planning discussions about portals, campuses must think clearly about the return on investment they need and expect." (p. 34) "Most current in-house portal projects have just begun to realize that a portal cannot be turned off one it is begun; thus campuses need to understand that recurring budgetary commitments are needed." (p. 36)
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