TechTalks Transcript
Preparing for Campus Portals
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Christine Geist [CG] |
 Colette Wagner [CW] |
March 30, 2000
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JB: Welcome to the CREN TechTalk series for spring of the new millennium and to this session on "Preparing for Campus Portals." You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus. A special thanks goes to Blackboard for their support of this TechTalk. Blackboard supports higher education, teaching and learning with their Course In Campus Management Systems.
This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and I'd like to welcome now the technology anchor for TechTalk, Howard Strauss of Princeton. Howard is a well-known web and information technology expert and more recently, an emerging expert on portals himself. Welcome, Howard!
HS: Thank you, Judith. You're always wondering what I'm going to say next. Now I'm starting to wonder what you're going to say!
JB: Well, keeping you on your toes!
HS: Okay, thank you, Judith.
JB: Okay.
HS: Okay, I'm Howard Strauss, the technology anchor for today's TechTalk technology webcast. As technology anchor, my job is to engage our guest experts in a lively technical dialogue that will answer the questions you'd like answered, and ask those very important follow-up questions. You can ask our guest experts, Christine Geist and Colette Wagner, your own questions by sending e-mail to expert@cren.net anytime during this webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the webcast, we'll provide an answer in the webcast archive.
What business are universities in? To look at their web homepages, you'd think they were in the campus business. Almost every university homepage I look at features some impressive structure, some beautiful walkway, or endless stacks of books stretching to the horizon. Of course, universities are not in the campus business, any more than they are in the parking business, the dining hall business, or even the library business. They are in the education business.
The education business deals with individuals, not with buildings. Being in the education business, however, requires many different kinds of people -- teachers, researchers, accountants, bakers, janitors, groundskeepers, programmers and many others -- including, of course, students. Why is it, then, that university homepages all look so similar and so campus-oriented?
Actually, up until very recently, there's been very little choice. Web homepages are necessarily institution-centric because they are built to proclaim to the whole world what a wonderful place the university is. What better way to do that than to feature majestic buildings on campus? But suppose you could have a web page that knew who you were and customize itself to give you access to everything on the web you needed? One where you and the system collaborated to shape the data and the web page to what was ideal for you and the way you work. Then students would see a far different view of the university than an IT programmer, and in fact, a sophomore in computer science would see quite a different view from a graduate student in creative writing.
A website such as that is called a portal. A portal changes the way that users use the web and changed the way that universities build websites. It changes the web from an institution-centric view to a user-centric view. But beware! Everything is being called a portal today. At this year's Detroit Auto Show, Jacques A. Nasser, Ford CEO, said, "We will do nothing short of transforming our cars and trucks into a portal for the Internet." Jacques doesn't mean "portal" -- he means "port." But "portal" is much catchier. Some folks have just taken their homepages, added the word "portal" to them and declared portalware victory.
Building a portal can be a daunting task. Even if you buy one, there will be questions about what the content should be, who will own it and how to get from where you are to the nirvana that web portals seem to promise. Whatever you do, the web is about to change -- again! Portals will be a big part of that change. We'll help you catch up on what's happening with campus portals and what we should do about them on today's webcast of TechTalk.
Judith?
JB: Thanks very much, Howard, and I think you're right. Since we did this session at Blackboard last week, a number of folks have commented to me that we are now, right now, at a point where we were maybe three years ago, with every university worrying about building their "university website." Now everyone's talking about how do we go to the portals, how do we go to university and campus portals.
And for that, I'm very pleased to welcome our two experts today, Christine Geist from Rochester Institute of Technology, and Colette Wagner from CUNY. Let me just introduce them both to you very quickly. Christine is the Director of Distance Learning and the Co-director of the Educational Technology Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology. And Colette Wagner is the Assistant Dean and Director of Education Training and Staff Development in the City University of New York's Office of Computing and Information Services. Colette directs CUNY Online and also teaches Information Studies.
More about Christine and Colette is available at the event page with links to many interesting sites about portals and portal wannabes. Our website, in fact, has many links this time, I think exemplifying the fact that portals are in such a defining stage as we're talking.
Welcome, Colette and Christine. So glad that you can be here.
CG: Thank you, Judith and Howard. Happy to be joining you.
HS: Since Judith pointed out that portals are in such a state of flux here -- defining them -- maybe what we can start to do is define what a portal is. I know we probably won't be able to come up with a definition tight enough to please anybody, but at least we can take a poke at it? Chris?
CG: Well, since we did this last week at Blackboard, where a couple of my friends came up to me afterwards and suggested some definitions beyond what we talked about, and I'd like to share those with you. My friend Steve Ehrmann said that he thought a portal was a place that you go to go somewhere else. Nice little definition! A doorway.
HS: That sounds like one of those things like Atlanta or Denver.
JB: Right!
CG: And another, Paul McCue, the Chief Technology Officer at NextEd, his definition was it's a goal-based web application that enables you to combine and pull in sets of relationships.
JB: Hmm, okay. Another way of saying, perhaps, structured?
CG: Um-hum.
JB: Okay.
HS: And you want to try any of your definitions, Chris?
CW: Well, this is Colette, but, sure, I'll try my definitions.
HS: Either one! Since we can't see you on the phone!
CW: Right, okay. Well, I started to talk about portals by using a description that Jerry McCartney of the Wharton School provided in a recent Converge issue. His notion of a portal is a place that draws people to it because of what it offers and what it enables. And then I would like to extend that definition (and this is some research I've done at the Gartner Group resource) and say that a portal provides a user with structure and navigational tools. It gives a user the ability to share and collaborate. It synthesizes material or it provides a place where one can find synthesis and, most important of all, it allows the user to profile and personalize their interaction with the enterprise.
HS: Maybe one way to look at this thing is to talk about what's the difference between a homepage and a portal. Chris, you want to try that?
CG: Yes, I think a web page, a simple web page homepage is sort of a pre-portal stage, a little bit smaller unit than a portal. I think a portal has features on it that enable people to not just aggregate information, which you could see on a homepage, but adds another dimension to the information.
That's what Paul McCue was getting at in his definition about pulling in sets of relationships, being able to pull in communities that are interesting to you, pull in information and the ability to customize and have services and interactions with people and with information. And those aren't features of your typical homepage.
HS: Colette?
CW: Well, again, just to repeat what Chris said, the homepage is a static -- if you will, when we started out with homepages in the early 90s, the mid to early 90s, we talked about homepages and early pages as a calling card on the Internet. What we've done now is move beyond that to having our catalogues on the Internet, but now, if we move into a portal world, we will have actual interactive services available to our Intranet, our Extranet clients, as well -- and then some static information that will always be necessary for people who are interested in organizations but not connected to us.
JB: I was thinking after we talked last week, too -- would it be fair to think about the early stages of the university homepages as really almost equivalent to a book? It provides very structured information at the same time and provides all that information there for you, but it doesn't provide the interactivity. So it's more like a book, a brochure or catalogue. That's maybe the website that we had before?
CG: Our webmaster here at RIT shared some information with me that -- he said historically, the Admissions Departments were the first to care about and put up institutional homepages. So that calling card, the RIT homepage, the institutional look that Howard talked about in his introduction really was sort of the Admissions point of view in terms of wanting to get the word out and attract students to come to the institution. So I think it's more than just our catalogue example. That was the original content, but it was a particular institutional view that was being put forth, and I guess that point of view is very popular and how many institutional homepages got started and are still coming from that perspective.
HS: One of the things I saw actually from Judith was the idea that perhaps a portal involved collaboration between the user and the system to shape the data into a form that was the way the user wanted it to be. That seems like another way of talking about a portal, as something that -- you normally don't think about collaboration between a person and a system, but perhaps there is some of that going on.
CG: I would agree with you, Howard, on that one, in terms of even providing people -- talking about students primarily -- but providing people, the community of the institution and outsiders being able to view it from their perspective, being able to see the information from their perspective. They're in control, not the institution. I think that's the change that most of us are going through, and we're using the word "portal" to describe it.
HS: Before we go on here, there's a couple questions that have come in, actually before we started. And by the way, that's always okay. You can send your questions in days before. That would be fine. But we have a couple questions here from Gina Pappa from a place called the Georgia G.L.O.B.E. (G.L.O.B.E. is spelled with dots between the letters, so I assume that G.L.O.B.E. stands for something). But Gina's first question is, is there any literature that serves as a good reference for planning, researching, developing, implementing and maintaining effective portals? In other words, Gina says, is there a portal builder's bible? Do any of you know anything like that?
CG: Colette, have you seen a portal builder's bible?
CW: If I knew where the bible was, I'd be going there! I have not seen -- there are a number of resources that, some of them are listed on the page, the resource page for this event, but I honestly don't know of one. How about you, Chris?
CG: I'm not sure if this is on our resource page. I just came across this this afternoon. There's a website called traffick.com. Are you guys familiar with that? It's t-r-a-f-f-i-c-k dot com, and they claim to be the traffic, the guide to portals. And there's actually a really interesting -- they call it the portal Frequently Asked Questions, which I found really useful in terms of an overview and pointers to more in-depth information. So I thought that was a pretty good resource. I don't know if it's really comprehensive enough to be a bible. They only got started in September, September 1, 1999. But I found that very helpful.
HS: On Internet time, that's as old as the Bible!
CG: Right!
JB: There was actually another book that was listed on our event page, and actually, I don't see it there right now! I was just going to refer everyone to it, and it doesn't seem to be right there. I'll find it in the course of this and we'll get it up there. It was -- I'm going to just stop talking there right now because I can't find it. So Howard, go ahead.
HS: One thing I would suggest to Gina is to look at the CREN events. This will be the second event we've done on portals. I think we have a lot of stuff, put together a lot of resources there, and it just might be that we have one of the best places to go to. Gina's other question is, has anyone come across any multiple institutions or entity portals where all services are integrated, she says, on the back door, and all transactions are real-time? Do you have any idea what Gina is asking here?
CG: All transactions are real-time? I'm not sure exactly what Gina's -- I'm not sure what she's trying to get at.
CW: I'm not either. This is Colette. I have the site that I've recommended that we look at. It's really rather interesting. I'm sure it's not as sophisticated as Gina is asking about, if I understand Gina's question. I think she's talking about probably a multi-campus or a multi-organization system having a single portal. But New York State has been doing something interesting. I've described it as "portal-like." It's called New York Mentor, www.nymentor.edu. And it is a place that I would consider a portal for higher education in the state of New York, and for applicants to colleges and universities. It is a place where you can find links to the admissions information of 200 plus colleges in the state and also it allows you to apply to those colleges online, to set up a profile where you select a number of colleges that you interact with, and to begin to fill out your financial aid forms. This is as close to a multi-institution portal as I've seen. I don't know if anybody else has seen anything like it.
JB: In fact, that link is on the website, and I think as I looked at it, as well, it really is moving from being a website to a portal and it really is providing services.
CW: Yes, absolutely, but is it doing everything that Gina is asking? I would say probably not, and unfortunately, I don't have any information about what their future plans are. But they certainly seem to be building a most comprehensive suite of services for the potential college applicant in the state of New York.
JB: Well, why don't we talk about that just a little bit? At that portal -- can students go to and actually apply to one of the institutions, through that portal?
CW: Yes, they can!
JB: And they can apply for financial aid?
CW: Yes.
JB: Okay.
CW: And they continue to build services. It's really quite an impressive undertaking.
JB: So it's really a service center for students looking for programs in the New York state, then?
CW: That's correct!
JB: And I wonder, what about the search as far as if I'm looking for a specific degree program or certificate program. Is it structured that way, Colette?
CW: Well, what you can do is you can go in and you can find the list of participating schools.
JB: Okay.
CW: So there are over 200 and the list is alphabetical. You can go in and it allows you to apply to college, it allows you to apply for your financial aid online and eventually will allow you to apply for scholarships as well. There's a freshman student planner, there is the notion of providing campus tutors who would assist you in following through on your college application. It's really quite an interesting site, directed at the market of the college applicant who is interested in institutions in the state of New York.
CG: Colette, that's a really good example. I'm wondering what goes on behind the scenes? Part of the question that came in was, how many of these things are building live systems, live transactions, real-time transactions behind the scenes? Do you know what's going on at a little bit deeper level?
CW: No, I actually don't, but I do know that I could pursue this and make it available as a footnote to the talk.
CG: Yeah, because even though there are many education sort of clearinghouse portals, [inaudible] as an example, [inaudible], places like that. And we participate in some of those as part of our marketing, especially for our distance learning programs. And many of those are trying to aggregate services similar to what you described, Colette, that the New York State schools are doing.
Behind the scenes, though, from a participant in that portal, it only goes so far, at least in our system. There's no live connection behind the scenes to our admission database, there's no live connection to our registration page. It just sort of stops and then it has to interface with our legacy --
HS: But I think we all agree there ought to be, though.
CG: Well, yeah, we'd love to get there one of these years.
CW: Absolutely, and if you remember, I prefaced my remarks with saying that I didn't know how far this would match Gina's question.
JB: Um-hum. Well, what about -- maybe we can talk a little bit about, Christine, the virtual union that you have evolved at Rochester Institute of Technology.
CG: Our pre-portal?
JB: Your pre-portal!
HS: We'll talk about what that means. Okay, I mean I think that what's an interesting point is that perhaps folks won't go from a standard homepage right to a portal. There's a couple stepping stones in between and it seems like perhaps you have one.
CG: Yeah, I think our RIT Virtual Union, I think it's on the link page on the site here.
HS: Oh, every resource is on the page!
CG: ritvu.rit.edu. I think it's a good example of one of those stepping stones on the way to being a portal. It's an aggregate of resources. We use this now as our student view into the RIT's 500, 1,000 web pages on our site. And it's an attempt to bring together the resources in one-stop-shop for students, and it's sort of a union kind of theme -- everything that students will want to look at.
We've started to add some more interesting features than just aggregating information, like the RITCam is one of the most popular things that people look at on this site. A link to the streaming RIT radio station, you know, sports information, those kinds of things. We haven't taken it to the next level yet. It's more complicated technically to add community features, for example, pulling in what we might call channels of information from other places, so it really is at that sort of embryonic stage where it's ready to blossom into something much bigger. Right now, it's just an aggregate of resources.
JB: What about, when you said the RITCam -- you want to tell people what that is?
CW: Yeah, that's a camera, a little camera that's right now, I think, in our Bausch and Lomb building, looking out at our campus. And it updates as well, it's a camera that updates, I think, every 30 seconds and gives a view of what's going on at RIT. And we move it around to different locations across our campus.
HS: We're acting like, of course, everybody's going to go off and build these portals and things, but what's the impetus behind doing this? Who's really pushing for these kinds of things? Is it the students, the faculty, the staff, or is it just technical folks who want to be entertained here.
CG: It's the technical staff who like to maintain all these websites, those are the people who are driving it!
HS: No, really, where's the push for this coming? Who really wants this to happen?
CG: We're finding, the Admissions group really wants the information out there and they have their finger on the pulse of what students want and they would really like to move into the portal arena because that's what students are looking for and that's what they're expecting. And they want to be able to fit into those expectations.
Also, on the student life side, Student Affairs have taken a leadership role there -- responsible for the RITVU, we work on it with them, RIT Virtual Union. And they really are -- they've been looking at Mascot.com, for example, and some of those other commercial portals to really create student life on our website. And so they're looking at solutions.
And from our distance learning perspective, we're looking for ways to meet student needs, not just for information about our campus, but to help them feel like they're a connected part of our physical campus here as well.
HS: But Mascot.com is not really a portal, is it? I mean, it does something quite different.
CG: It's a tool. In my opinion, it's a tool you can use to create a portal.
HS: Okay, for folks who don't know anything about Mascot.com, my understanding is that what it is is an attempt to create communities among students. It's not really giving students access to university data or things like that. It is a bunch of chat rooms and bulletin boards and things like that. Is that sort of what it is?
CG: From my reading of it, you can customize. They were here on campus and they gave a demo, too. You can customize the view of Mascot.com so it looks like your campus and you can link in. You have all these different communities, you can customize and go outside of your campus. But you can -- like most of these things that are in our RIT Virtual Union, these resources and information pages, can be inside of that kind of environment. They can also be inside of the Blackboard environment, the Enterprise version, which is another solution that we're looking at. We're actually in the process of implementing that for our fall quarter.
HS: You're going to implement Blackboard's Enterprise [inaudible] and you're going to have Mascot as well? Are they going to work together?
CG: No, no, they're not going to work together. Sorry, Mascot!
HS: No, but that brings up another interesting question. If Mascot is a portal and Blackboard Enterprise is a portal and all these other things are portals, how many portals should you have on your campus? A lot of folks would say "one."
JB: Can they work together and what kinds of back-end systems? And I think that's where we start getting near the question that Gina asked earlier, just what kinds of back-end systems do you have to have in order for that to work? So actually what about going back to -- you're implementing that this fall. What kind of student data is going to be linked for that implementation?
CG: The kind of decisions that we're looking at right now, we have to integrate our student information system so that the courses that are in the system, when the student goes to their "My RIT" page, which will be created through the CourseInfo Enterprise system -- any course that they're registered in that is in the Blackboard CourseInfo system and will automatically be on their view of their RIT My Page. That will integrate in with the RIT events calendar so that they can not only see RIT events, they can see their club events, they can see different groups that they're part of that are using this system for events and also for forums and other discussion groups. They can also see their class events through this kind of combined calendar. And then we have to decide which links to the campus we want to have on that My RIT view page in the Course Info Enterprise system.
JB: All right, so that's really a project that's in progress right now?
CG: Yeah, we're just making those decisions right now, just starting.
HS: Are you going to include faculty in that? I know that in Enterprise, you certainly can. Or are you just going to have students there? I mean, is this going to be a student portal or a student and faculty portal?
CG: Well, this really will be -- you can use it for your whole campus, so faculty, student and staff. We're going to have many, probably, departmental and faculty groups using the forums that are inside of the CourseInfo Enterprise package.
HS: So you'll be hooking your own data sources, your own channels into those things.
CG: Um-hum.
HS: Things quite outside the scope of students taking courses.
CG: Yes. It can actually hook into many databases that we don't even have yet. They don't even exist yet here, so we'll have some little bit of room to grow.
JB: Okay, so in terms of what you're doing, the first implementation then, if I'm a student, launching a -- I will have a My RIT page that I will go to?
CG: Um-hum.
JB: Is this going to be for your entire student body this fall?
CG: It's licensed for our whole campus, so when we build it, it will be for the whole campus. I'm sure it will take a while before it really catches on and people really do start using it and finding it useful.
One of the things we'll be doing is converting what still exists of our old Vax Notes conferences. We used to have a very lively Vax Notes community, back probably about five years ago. College Life was a really popular one -- many clubs, the Greeks and fraternities had lots of conversations and activity there, classifieds and things like that. We're expecting that what's left of those -- if they haven't already moved off campus or used other forums that you can get free on the Web -- will be to use this and create those kinds of tools in the CourseInfo Enterprise.
CW: At CUNY, we're also Blackboard customers, but our approach is slightly different. What we've done, we're an institution that is 19 campuses and we have licensed the CourseInfo product at this point for the entire university as an instructional environment for local instruction as well as for distance students. And so we haven't yet gotten to the point where we are entertaining an Enterprise solution across the university or at any of our colleges. But it certainly is an interesting option.
HS: Chris, you said something that's so interesting and kind of challenging. You talked about databases that haven't even been invented yet or weren't even there yet. And this makes me wonder about how do you decide what things you're going to offer in your portal. I mean, the things that are going to be in your portal are going to be channels which are going to be fed from some database, that you said some don't even exist yet. But how do you go about deciding what should be there and what should be there for different kinds of people?
CG: Well, you get a lot of people in a big room and you --
HS: Lock the doors.
CG: You feed them some really good pizza.
HS: Lock the doors and bring pizza in, right?
CG: We're going through those things right now. There are several groups on campus that we're going to working with that will be part of this project. One of them --
HS: Who's really involved? Who are your real important --
CG: Who's really involved? Well, we have one of the main groups that's been around since RIT started its web page years ago that we call the RIT Web Core group, and that's really a support group of the webmaster, the CIO -- the Chief Information Officer is a big part of that -- and there are representatives from all the key departments that have things on the Web and have strong constituencies on the Web like Alumni Relations, Admissions, the technical people, Academic Services, the Library folks. There's all these different subcommittees. They're the main decisionmakers on what RIT's website looks like today and all the pieces of it and how it's managed and what technologies get implemented there.
Other sort of subgroups, Student Affairs -- the whole division of Student Affairs is really working hard to provide more interactive and collaborative services for students and make the Web a more lively place where Student Life, you can actually see Student Life on the Web. So they're going to be big players. But it's a lot of the technology and the people who are really representing the different audiences that we're trying to serve.
HS: So you have lots of user involvement here?
CG: Yeah, we're trying. I hope we have enough user involvement.
Frankly, I don't think we have enough direct student involvement. I think we need to get our Student Government in. They're not on these committees. They're mostly administrators, managers and faculty and staff. We need to get more involved with the direct student groups.
And Student Government, somebody pointed this out to me, a colleague of mine out in the Union when we were going to lunch, that they're now offering listserves -- the Student Government is -- that students can sign up for to find out the latest campus events and the latest news. That group needs to be involved in these conversations and decisions also.
HS: Oh, yeah, that sounds like -- for me, this is a big step ahead of listserves. Instead of doing this with listserves -- I mean, that was last year's technology!
CG: But at RIT, we really haven't implemented any campus-wide solutions for things like listserves and discussion forums, so this is really -- we sort of put things on hold for awhile and we're looking at Enterprise as being one of our primary solutions to provide that kind of functionality for the whole campus.
HS: Okay, I wonder, Colette or Chris, are either of you thinking about portals that extend outside the university, that include distance learning?
CG: I'm certainly thinking about that! Colette, you want to go?
CW: Well, sure.
HS: How is that going to differ from the things that we're offering inside the campus?
CW: Well, I think for CUNY, I think that we are talking about -- when we talk about portal issues for CUNY, I think that there are some basic facts that we have to recognize. We're the largest urban public university system in the country and our students, even when they're engaged in distance learning activities per se, are often using the brick institutions to provide them with access to the content in the courses.
So our portal, as I begin to imagine it -- and I have to say, though, we're not so far along in our conversations about how we will build a portal or multiple portals at our colleges -- our portals are going to have to take into account the fact that our physical institutions, we are going to continue to be brick institutions for our populations as well as click institutions. And so our portals are going to be addressing those issues of a population that is using resources on campus in order to access the distance learning content, if you will. It's a very interesting situation and not at all like the RIT model.
So I would say that our portals are going to be reaching to provide students -- our students are the type of students who are pressed and busy and working and parents and the portal that we build for our on-campus students is going to be very much like the portal that our distance students will need because they have the same limitations in terms of availing themselves of campus facilities and services. And the desire to be part of the campus.
CG: Yeah, we found that, too, with our distance learning students. We have about 5,000 distance enrollments. That's what we had last year, and part of our strategic plan is to double that in the next, about, three years. And we're the third largest provider, by one study, of distance learning in the United States. We have a lot of distance learning students!
Actually, about half of those, though, are combining on-campus and distance learning courses. And then the other group are far away and close by, but they're completely taking their courses online and using different technology. But we found that they do, many of them do want to feel a connection to the campus. So they have participated in discussion forums that we have in our First Class system, which is what we use primarily for distance learning. You know, they've set up a Graduating Class of '99 kind of folder and they talk to each other. Not everybody, for those that want it.
We're looking to be able to sort of merge the distance learning environment with the on-campus environment in a lot of ways for those people that want to be able to take advantage of it. Right now, people can easily get to the RIT Virtual Union page, for example, to listen to sports games and things like that. But we're going to want to see what happens when more discussion forums get going in the new system coming this year to see how many distance learning students participate in the on-campus discussions, because these are all virtual discussions -- they don't have to be on campus to take part! So we're interested to see what happens there.
But these are different audiences, and I think we need to keep very careful track of what students want. I mean, the purpose of doing these kinds of things is to meet student needs, and I do think there is a pretty big difference between the traditional freshman and sophomore and what they're looking for in a Web experience and the kind of services that they want vs. what the adult students, who are career-oriented and career minded and have many, many other time obligations, what they want to see. So I do think the customization and keeping track of what the users need is going to become more and more important.
CW: It gets back to the essential question of who are your students, who are your faculty, what are the services they need and want and how can you best provide them?
CG: Exactly!
CW: That is the biggest part of this portal enterprise question that we must attend to.
JB: Let me bring up a question. We had some other questions coming in early on from George Shearer from Seattle University. And he had a multi-part question, and I'm going to select one of them. That has to do with, I think, the feasibility of the kind of personalization that we're talking about. On the one hand, just how practical is it and to what level can we really customize based on who the user is in a campus portal setting? And can we, in fact, then move to a point at which the models will be really intuitive? So it's really asking a question, I think, about just how integrated our campus portals can be with how much information, perhaps, that we might be able to link it with.
CG: Well, that's a great question!
CW: It really is a good question, isn't it?
CG: And maybe that's how we get beyond portals. First web pages, then portals, you know. What's coming next?
JB: What's after portals, huh?
CG: Yes! And one of the things that we think about, especially with our distance learning programs, is it's one thing to have access to information related to the campus and campus activities and maybe to pull in information from outside resources like the weather and the news and sports and things like that.
But I think for some of our programs, especially where we have really strong areas, we're looking at what kind of portals or what kind of environments can we create online -- almost like the business-to-business kind of portal, where depending on what hat the person is wearing and what they're looking to do, maybe it's not one portal that's totally customized. Maybe you're creating something that's, when they're wearing their professional hat, this is the kind of environment they're in.
JB: Um-hum.
CG: So we're trying to sort of get out of our box a little bit and look outside and see what else can we create, not just looking at the institutional view.
CW: Absolutely. I think as we approach this, we have to begin to see where can we go, how far will the technology allow us to go, and how far can we push it and serve our needs.
JB: Well, at this point, I generally remind all of our listeners and participants to go ahead and be sure to send in their questions to expert@cren.net.
And with that, let me bring up another question. Actually, a question and a comment. We had a comment come in from John--John from University of Illinois, and John, you'll have to help me with your last name! But let's call you just John S for now. And he mentioned that it might be interesting for our listeners to go to Mascot.com. And there are some customized examples there, providing pictures of channels and all that, so we'll put that up on our event page. And then we also got another question from Arizona State University and her name is Katherine Raines. And she is asking a little bit more about, I think, how we design portals on campus and who plays a role in the shaping of a student portal. Maybe you can help us with that, Chris, with your Virtual Student Union development. Did you get your students involved in that?
CG: We've tried to do this. Well, it got started with our department and a couple of other players that wanted to help us aggregate information, and then very quickly, the division of Student Affairs at the vice president level started to take responsibility and get all of their people involved and really took it on as sort of a division-wide initiative, including students, to get information out there, get it updated, try to identify what students needed, how to organize it in a way that would make sense to students. Again, taking that sort of "how can we organize it" phase as opposed to a student-centered approach.
But those were the decisionmakers on our side. I think, you know, if the goal is to really meet the needs of students, we need again to step out of our box a little bit and really talk more directly to students and give them tools to create their own environment too -- empower them, become more student-centered. That's a big challenge. We're still struggling with that.
JB: What about the question I've had a lot of folks ask over the last couple of weeks or so, as we've been talking about portals, and that is, the question has come up of the commercialization of student portals. Have either of you addressed that issue of advertising on student portals?
CG: That's a hot one here! Last week, when we talked about this, I had thought that we had allowed advertising on the student websites and like our Reporter magazine and things like that, and some of the student clubs. And since then, now I have confirmation, that's not true! We're not allowing any advertising on RIT's dot-edu site.
HS: Okay, but you know the Enterprise edition of CourseInfo, you know that they will reduce the cost of the thing to you if you allow them to put advertising on it. I assume they made that pitch to RIT. Did they?
CG: Actually, they didn't make that pitch!
HS: Oh, well!
JB: Tomorrow!
HS: They certainly mentioned it to us!
CG: Give me a call, Blackboard! Let's talk!
HS: Blackboard, call in and tell us what's going on! But that was our understanding, was that they would reduce the cost of the Enterprise edition if you would allow them to put some advertising on the thing. And in fact, that they would share the revenues with you for --
CG: Yeah, RIT, I mean, we've been talking about this for a year, and just in the last week, this RIT core group headed by the CIO, the webmaster and all those representatives, has definitely decided not to allow advertising on RIT's websites. They just don't want to open that box into that world at this point in time.,�
HS: Would that look different if the advertising was from your university bookstore or from some student organization?
CG: Well, that we already do, okay? Advertising our own stuff is okay.
CW: Well, at CUNY, we do not advertise on our CUNY page, and our legal affairs department is extremely concerned as we move forward. They want to be -- and I urge everyone, as you begin to consider some of these options, to get engaged with some of the people in your legal affairs division. The issues here are just so phenomenal and could actually not only be in conflict with law, federal and state and regional and local, but also with university policy in the sense of if you did get engaged with advertisers, the advertisers who are brought in may be tobacco industry and your institution may have a rule against allowing that kind of promotion on any campus site. So there are many, many issues that must be addressed here, and one of the best partners you can have is your own legal affairs division.
JB: That's probably a really good reminder! We've got another question coming in, actually, that is a good segue from that, and that's from Kimberly Butz from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. She's asking about developing portals for your alumni association. She mentioned that everything we've talked about so far has been more focused on students and faculty. What about alumni associations, and are either of you involved with that or aware of other folks who are doing that?
CW: Well, I'll just answer from the central office perspective in an institution with 19 colleges. Alumni relations are largely handled at the college level, and so that is a local issue more than it is for my office, although there are some central. As we start to plan how we're going to change our web page and have it migrate into a portal over a period of time, we will be engaging with all of those offices that Chris mentioned -- Student Services, they are already working on their ideas. Admissions. And our University Relations office will be a key player because they are the key contact point in our central organization for alumni affairs.
CG: Yeah, at RIT, our Alumni Relations group, probably over two years ago, they were one of the first to create an online network for RIT alumni, and they contracted out with, I think, it's Harris Corporation and became one of the first, like a beta tester of their new product which is actually called Alumni Network (if you go to www.alumninetwork.com). So we've sort of outsourced that whole alumni network system which includes e-mail and discussion forums and a free lifetime hosting of your e-mail and a homepage and some other services are hosted through this separate entity that's all -- you can get at it from, I think, the RIT Virtual Union page and also from the main page.
HS: One question related to advertising is what kind of commercial things can you have on your portal? For example, a lot of folks would like to have a weather channel on their portal, and some other folks might like to track their stocks on a portal and so forth. Now, I know you're supposed to only use university computer equipment for university type work, but if you have a faculty member who would like to keep track of the weather or like to keep track of his or her own stocks, is that okay? And how do you decide which of those sort of commercial things are okay?
CG: I think people are doing that already, just through customizing their browsers, aren't they? Or other places where they --
HS: Sure, but when you build your own portal, Chris, would you build your own portal with, say, Enterprise -- if you're going to build your portal with Enterprise, are you going to allow folks on that portal to subscribe to a channel that keeps track of stocks?
CG: Well, I don't know! I guess we'll have to talk about that. I sure would hope we could.
HS: And what about news services? I mean, where does the -- how far out into the commercial world? If somebody wants to turn their portal into a bunch of channels that amount to recreation, entertainment, whatever, is that okay?
CW: You know, that is a question, Howard, that every institution has to answer for itself. And that is where the planning comes in. What will we offer, to whom and how? Who are our partners? Who are their backers? What will those relationships do, who are the providers and the backers, and what will those relationships, how will they affect how we structure ourselves and our services? These are the questions that we have to ask in a very careful planning process.
Chris is down the road on that planning process. At CUNY, we're coming at the planning process only now. We're beginning to plan, and as I said last week, I'm working with two colleagues from IBM -- from Watson and from the Education Unit -- and we're going to start to build a workshop where we define our audiences and our views. We're going to talk about the infrastructure and we're going to talk about what content should be, could be, might be and what are those issues of access? What is it fair to expect in that portal? What are the things that I shouldn't be entertaining as portal content? These are questions that every college, every university, every educational institution must answer in relation to its own policy, its own identity, its own mission.
HS: So you think this is going to actually cause universities to have to rethink some of their policies or come up with some new policies?
CG: Oh, yes.
CW: Absolutely! This is a new world.
CG: And I think really, the fundamental question is, what is the identity that the university wants to preserve? What is it, when we say "campus community," what does RIT mean and how do we want to reflect that in the virtual environment that we create for our community? Alumni, students, potential students, parents, everyone in that community. And that's really the hardest question to address. But it's also the most fun, the most challenging.
And one thing to keep in mind that has been an issue for RIT -- we have the National Technical Institute for the Deaf here on our campus, so we're very sensitized to this issue, but it really is a challenge to create online environments and online courses that are accessible to people with disabilities.
JB: As we look at protecting the identity -- and projecting perhaps, as well, the identity of the university, we had another question that did come in from George Shearer asking about the integrity of the information resources and asking, perhaps, is the portal, as we implement campus portals, student portals, faculty portals, are those less secure? And are you having any difficulty or have you experienced any difficulty with people reflecting which information is flowing from the institution as kind of a formal information vs. that which may not be sanctioned by the university? How are you dealing with that issue?
CG: Well, right now at RIT, we're dealing with it pretty simply. I'd say we're definitely in the stages to portal [inaudible], lots in the pre-portal stage. Right now, we're dealing with it just by limiting it. It's pretty clear that almost all the information that's on the RIT website that's accessible from the main pages is RIT -- from some sort of RIT department or RIT student group or something like that. Although there are 500,000 pages and many of them are individual RIT student pages, it's more difficult to find those, and therefore it sort of eliminates a lot of that confusion at this stage in our development.
JB: Okay, thank you. I think we're at the point where we usually ask for some practical hints for a campus, if a campus is still really at the website point of development. How does one start moving to the portal, so to speak?
CW: I think that you start to differentiate views of the university and you do what Chris has done at RIT and what has been done elsewhere in some of our sample pages. You start to show faces of the university to your primary audiences, your target audiences -- new students, applicants, alumni. I think that you start to develop custom views, even in our static, if you will, old technology web presence, where we begin to indicate that we are differentiating, that we understand that we serve populations who have a specific identity and who want to interact with us in very specific ways.
JB: Chris, what do you think?
CG: Well, I totally agree with everything Colette said! I would add, one of the biggest challenges is keeping the information up to date and building systems that are part of your work flow -- for the people that are responsible for the information to really make it a living and breathing, a lively place where this information is current and really reflects the activities that are going on in the online and campus community. That's a really big challenge and it has more to do with how work is done organizationally than the technology solutions. That's one of the hardest things to put in place.
JB: And I think, perhaps, as we watch the development on the various vendors' products that are coming out to help with portalware, that may well be another place where people can start.
HS: You said it, Judith! Portalware!
JB: Portalware! I did! I wasn't going to say that! Anyhow, Howard, do you have a final comment for our --
HS: Actually, I do have a final comment here, though --
JB: Am I surprised!
HS: Not the comment that I would make here. We have a note, and I know you're looking at it, Judith. We have a note from John Spondillas, who told us how to pronounce his name, and he said something that I really feel compelled to share with folks who are listening. John -- and again, I'll say your last name again since you made a point of telling us how to say it, Spondillas, says, "This is a really neat concept, as good as Car Talk!" John, Car Talk is one of the best shows on NPR. If we're even one-tenth as good as Car Talk, I'm really flattered. Thank you for your comment. It's really wonderful to hear you say that!
JB: All right, I'll echo that and also, I want to thank Terry Calhoun. He reminded me of the book that I was trying to remember earlier, and we've got that linked up on the website now, but just to mention it, it is by Jacob Nielsen, and it's called "Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity," which always attracts me. I love things that are very complex but are simple to use. And it's a December 99 publication date -- and Terry was concerned that it was out of date, so there it is!
So I would like to go ahead and do our closing notes and thank all of our web participants for being with us here today. And for now, set aside time on your calendar for two weeks from today, on April 13, for Jeff Schiller and another look at Certificate Authority and Server Security Issues -- Setting Up Secure Servers. Watch for more info at the CREN TechTalk website and be sure to join us.
Many thanks to all of the institutions who help to support these TechTalks and also thanks to Blackboard for their sponsorship of this event. Look at their website to see their support for web course hosting, if you are not yet ready. Thanks to everyone else who helped make this event possible today: to our guest experts, Colette Wagner and Christine Geist; to our technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, event page producer; to David Smith and Patty Gaul of CREN; Julia O'Brien, Jason Russell, Carol Wadsworth and the whole support team at Merit; to Susie Berneis, audio file transcriber; to Laurel Erickson, transcript editor and indexer; and finally, a thanks to all of you for being here and sharing this discussion. You were here because it's time.
Bye, Colette, Christine. Bye, Howard. Bye, everyone.
HS: Bye, Judith, bye, Chris, bye, Colette.
CG: Thank you, bye.
CW: Bye-bye.
