TechTalks Transcript
Campus and Student Portals: Where Are We Today?
Howard Strauss
[HS] |
Terry Calhoun
[TC] |
Michael Handberg
[MH] |
Oren Sreebny
[OR] |
Pennie S. Turgeon
[PT] |
October 12, 2000
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TC: Welcome to the CREN Tech
Talk Series for Fall of 2000 and to this session on Campus and Student
Portals-Where Are We Today? You are here because it is time to discuss
the core technology for your campus in the future, and this one is moving
fast right at you. I'm Terry Calhoun, your CREN host for today. My other
hats include, but are not limited to, being the Director of Electronic
Communications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP)
and Listowner of the University Web Developers List (UWEBD).
On behalf of Judith Boettcher, CREN's
Executive Director, I would like to thank our CREN member institutions
for their support of the CREN Tech Talk series and specifically, BlackBoard
for its sponsorship of this Tech Talk event.
Let me welcome Howard Strauss of Princeton
University, our great technology anchor for Tech Talk. Howard is a well-know
Web technology expert and portal expert. He presented a session here
at EDUCAUSE on portals just yesterday afternoon and he will now introduce
the themes of this discussion. Welcome, Howard.
HS: Thank you, Terry. I'm Howard
Strauss, the anchor for the Tech Talk series of technology webcasts
and I should mention where Judith Boettcher is. She's in Paris. She
was just unable to get here and join us here in Nashville. In this webcast,
I invite you to join Terry and me in a lively technical dialogue with
our guest experts who will answer the questions you'd like answered
and to ask those very important follow-up questions. You can join in
this dialogue by sending your questions via e-mail to expert@cren.net
any time during the webcast. Since we're doing this webcast live from
EDUCAUSE 2000 in Nashville, Tennessee, I also invite members of the
audience to write down their questions and hand them to us. If we don't
get to your questions during the webcast, we'll provide an answer in
the webcast archives.
At this EDUCAUSE conference, there
are about ten presentations on web development and administration. There
are only six presentations on digital libraries. And while I could find
no sessions on supercomputers at all, I found about 16 sessions on portals,
the same number of presentations on e-commerce. Clearly, there's a great
deal of interest in portals.
But what are portals? At last year's
Detroit Auto Show, Jacques Nasser, Ford CEO, said, "We will do nothing
short of transforming our cars and trucks into portals for the Internet."
Peter Granhoff of wine.com says that wine.com's goal is "to become the
wine portal for all wine-lovers' needs." Both BlackBoard and Campus
Pipeline.com want to build a student web portal for your university.
And Alta Vista, AOL, MSN, Netscape, Excite, Yahoo! and dozens of other
websites that you thought just had homepages now claim to be portals.
Of course, no list of portals would be complete without mentioning Digisense
who is building-and I am not kidding-a Web portal for interactive smelling
experiences.
TC: Hmm!
HS: The hardware is available
right now. You can check it out. Yahoo! says that a portal is "a gateway
to the World Wide Web providing links to news, shopping, chats, games,
stock quotes, weather, TV listings, auctions and more." And James Joyce
said, "Mistakes are the portals of discovery."
Although many universities and corporations
have now built portals, web portals are still a very rapidly-evolving
area. At least in theory, portals should fundamentally change and improve
the way people use the web and the way web pages are developed. But
there are still a great many unanswered questions about web portals
and much research that needs to be done. As Albert Einstein said, "If
we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would
it?"
While we may not do any groundbreaking
research here today, our guest experts will attempt to clear away many
of the mysteries about campus and student portals on today's webcast
of Tech Talk. Terry?
TC: Thank you, Howard. If I
had a dime for every time I've heard the word "portals" this week, I
could take our entire cast out to dinner every Thuesday night for several
weeks in a row.
HS: That sounds like a great
idea! Why don't you do that?
TC: You're on!
Now, let's start first by introducing
Pennie Turgeon. Pennie is the Director of Instructional Media and Distance
Learning for the Division of Information Technology at Worcester Polytechnic
Institute. Judith wants me to say at this point, "Wow! Everybody has
long titles these days, don't they?" Pennie has a range of responsibilities,
but all focused on the support of the IT infrastructure for teaching,
learning and scholarship, including the Advanced Distance Learning Network.
For our purposes here, the most relevant is that she is the Project
Manager for the ongoing implementation of WPI's Information and Learning
Portal, myWPI.
Michael Handberg is a principal consultant
of PriceWaterhouse Coopers, working in the area of e-business and portal
development. He has developed an e-student services strategy and a best
practice perspective student portal for the University of North Carolina,
and he also worked with Indiana University to develop an institutional
e-business strategy. I'll bet he worked there with one of our guests
from our previous Tech Talk, Chris Geist.
MH: Yes.
TC: Right. He also presented
the session yesterday here at EDUCAUSE on E-Business and Portals. Prior
to joining PriceWaterhouse Coopers, Michael's efforts at the University
of Minnesota involved re-engineering its enrollment management around
a decentralized web-based self-service model. That won the University
a Best Practice Award from The American Productivity and Quality Center
(APQC).
Our third expert today, Oren Sreebny,
is Assistant Director of Computer and Communications at the University
of Washington. He oversees the client services functions including responsibility
for consulting, helpdesk, computer training, account management, desktop
support and policy issues. Oren has been involved in the award-winning
Uwired Collaboration which has promoted innovation in teaching and learning
through technology since its inception in 1994. Lately, Oren has been
participating in the roll-out and design of myUW-isn't that original?-the
UW portal system which is currently herding the cats toward the design
of a portal view for teaching faculty.
Howard?
HS: Okay, at this conference,
not only have we heard the word "portal" mentioned a million times,
probably, but we've probably heard almost that number of definitions
for a portal. I wonder if you could, Michael, Pennie and Oren, tell
us, what is a portal? Or what you think a portal is. Michael?
MH: Well, I sort of think about
in two fundamental ways. I think number one, I think a lot of people
refer to a portal as a set of technologies and tools, so for a lot of
people, sort running around, talking about portals, they're really just
talking about a set of technologies and tools from channel management
to authentication, chat sessions and other things which sort of build
generic community. And they're you know, very rapidly trying to set
up and build, you know, sort of a technology infrastructure that allows
them to do what portal development. I think secondly, another set of
portal is really around the business functionality, so I think this
is a lot harder to get at and get, you know, our heads around, which
is if the goal of a portal is to serve all of the university functions
for some discrete audience through a set of integrated web pages, there's
a lot of work and thinking that needs to go into sorting through what
are the most important facts, what are the facts that need to be, you
know, sort of presented, and what information do you need to provide,
and so the ongoing work around there, I think, is sort of a second,
you know, emphasis on portals.
HS: Pennie, your university
has built this thing called myWPI so you had some idea of what you were
trying to do or what you were trying to make this portal be. What do
you think a portal is in terms of this myWPI satisfying those needs?
PT: Well, myWPI started with
looking at the teaching and learning needs of the campus and the IT
infrastructure that would be required to support that, and that really
was driving our knowledge management strategy and so what we did was
sort of work towards creating a portal for our learning resources, being
sort of a customized, personalized interface to all of the university
knowledge resources and course resources and supporting materials and
then building upon that particular application to bring in alumni, prospective
students and administrators. And so the way we've approached it is sort
of to look at different constituents and blend them in one at a time.
HS: I didn't hear you mention
anything about technology, like Michael did. Michael said there was
a bunch of technology. Is that-how big a role does that play, or is
technology not very important here?
PT: Yes, I don't-we don't look
at it from a technology standpoint, although it's very important in
terms of bringing in all of the underlying IT infrastructure and making
sure that they can work with one another. I think really, portals boil
down to a knowledge management strategy and how you are going to push
information and how are you going to let people customize and access
information at the university through one single site.
HS: And Oren, you have myUW.
There's probably a my-everything out there, or there soon will be. Myportal.com.
OS: Yeah, and myUW actually
is an effort to, an attempt to manage people's relationships with our
university over the course of a lifetime, basically, and starting with
outreach efforts, you know, where they might be in, you know, in middle
school or high school and doing, taking some, you know, summer classes
at the university or a camp at the university, applying for school,
going to school at the university, graduating, become an alum or a football
fan or a patient at our hospital. So that's sort of our whole focus,
to be able to integrate, you know, somebody's experience at the university
over an entire lifetime of experience, realizing that there are multiple
overlapping relationships that have to be managed there. I also didn't
mention technology.
HS: Well, we'll get to that.
I think we're going to talk in a bit about what are some of the issues
in getting a portal going. But a question I'd like to ask before we
do that is, this Tech Talk was supposed to be talking about campus portals
as though that was a special kind of portal. What kind of portals are
there? My view has been that you really need one portal, and when we
talk about campus portals or other kinds of portals, that sounds a little
strange to me. Michael, do we have different kinds of portals? Should
we have lots and lots of these things?
MH: Well, that is a really
good question and my view of it is, yeah, there is kind of like one
portal that needs to be, you know, typically the university's homepage.
But I also think that the diversity of the university's business needs
are so great that there is not, you know, one single "portal" that you
can go into. It's almost like there's one portal and then these sub-portals
and, you know, the way that I think about it is that there's probably
one page that's essentially unauthenticated, meaning it's sort of a
portal but it's not really authenticated and really targeting all of
your, you know, sorts of services and other things to, you know, the
general public. And then probably one for faculty, one for staff, one
for students, one for alumni and one for prospective students.
HS: I mean, you think they're
really, really different things? This is not just somebody's customized
view of the same thing, but really, really different portals that you're
talking about?
MH: I think there's a lot of
overlap in terms of the contents and other services that are not unique
among these things. That means the thing that is unique for each of
those is that, you know, depending on those audiences, the things that
are most important to them are different and so it does radically affect
the way you might organize information you have within each one of those
portals.
HS: And Pennie and Oren, do
you agree that there's lots of different kinds of portals, or should
we-I mean, can universities really have one or do we have to have lots
of them?
PT: Well, ideally, I agree
with something you said yesterday in your presentation, that, you know,
it's best to have one, and if you have two, then you might as well have
12. You want people to go to one place to sort of receive information
about portal technology, I mean, information about your campus and I
think what differentiates a portal from a web page is a web page is
a web page is a web page for many and a portal is a web page for one.
And so your audience is sort of really narrowed down to the point where
you really have to have [inaudible].
HS: Oren, you want to add something
to that?
OS: Yeah, you know, I would
say that I think the thing that differentiates a campus portal from
portals like Yahoo! or Excite is really-we can bring a level of customization
to the campus portal that those other businesses can't do, at least
not initially, because we have a body of knowledge about our constituencies
that we can apply and hopefully derive some inferences about the stuff
that is the most useful to them and put that stuff in their face, Howard.
I think that's what you referred to as customization in your sort of
taxonomy of portals. And you know, I think the stuff Michael was talking
about, where there are different-where there are very different needs
sometimes for those different audiences, we're referring to that as
different views of the same portal or different sets of customized defaults.
If people start with-what we've been trying to do so far is offer people
the ability to personalize their portal and even if, you know, as long
as they have access to a body of information, they're authorized for
it, they can put that on their portal. You know, we don't say "Just
because you're a student doesn't mean you can't use the alumni resources."
HS: Okay, we have heard a great
deal about portals here and it seems to be a very hot topic at this
conference, but I wonder why. I mean, who's clamoring for these campus
portals? Is it the faculty, the staff, the students, or is it the IT
folks who are clamoring for it because it's a neat thing to do? Michael?
MH: I think it's-I think people
are just excited about it because it's sort of a new thing.
HS: But which people? Is it-I
mean, I'm just a little concerned that it's maybe the IT folks that
are excited about it.
MH: Well, I think it is the
IT folks, but I think generally across universities, people are consistently
looking for ways in which they can deliver services and information
better. I mean, that's the core business of the university and if a
portal or, you know, the technologies of the web and this sort of conce
PT: of a portal has sort of
emerged, which is really integration of data and of typical data that's
been unrelated before. And so I think that ability is a new thing that
we haven't seen before and I think that's generating a lot of excitement
from the technology staff, using new technologies, but also from the
functionality and other sorts of usefulness there.
PT: Yeah, I view it as all
those constituents that you mentioned are interested in the technology.
They just don't know it exists yet and one of our roles as IT managers
is to bring IT to the user as a tool. And campus portals are a tool
for meeting some of their needs.
HS: Right, so we would do some
marketing for this thing? I mean, this is something that, we think it's
neat and we think it'll really benefit them, and so we've got to do
some marketing for this thing.
PT: We kno we have to redefine
these within our university. We want to create relationships with our
alumni. We want to create relationships with our prospective students.
We want to be able to target information to different constituent groups.
And how do you do that? And so our users look to IT to see if there
are any technology-based tools out there that help them meet their needs.
And a portal is one of the ways that we can help them meet many different
needs.
HS: One point that you actually
sort of alluded to, and I guess I left it out of my question, was that
you mentioned many other constituencies than I did. You mentioned alumni,
prospective students and things like that, and I guess I really should
have included them too because they're perhaps people who are pushing
for this thing.
OS: Yeah, and I want to agree
very strongly. I mean, you know, we've been sort of going around showing
our varied mock-up of myUW to the various constituencies for about a
year and a half now. And the response has been just phenomenal from
all the constituencies we've showed it to. People have just leapt on
it and said, "This is exactly what we need!" You know, the alumni association,
the provost's office, the student affairs people. I mean, you can just
run down the whole list and people are just wildly enthusiastic.
HS: When they say, "Just what
we need!" what do they hope to get out of it? What do they see as the
benefits out of the thing for them, the various groups?
OS: Well, I think what they're
really looking for are ways to manage their communication with their
various constituencies in better ways than they've had before. They
know that people are, you know, really-especially, you know, constituencies
of universities are really a prime target of, sort of a prime example
of a group of people that are really living online now, and they know
that they want to get away from paper-based stuff. They want to have
information delivery that can be dynamic, that can be tailored to various
interest groups, and this provides them the means for doing that.
HS: And Pennie, it seems like
there ought to be advantages to the university itself for doing this
kind of thing. What kind of advantages do you see to the university
of putting portals in?
PT: Oh, prospective students.
I mean, if you can make a student feel-a prospective student, make them
feel as though they're part of your community before they ever sort
of show up and give you their tuition deposit, that can be tremendously
beneficial in terms of the recruitment. And in addition, on the other
end of the spectrum you have your alumni and sort of creating and building
relationships and facilitating communication amongst those disparate
groups, I mean, it gives us an opportunity to sort of really target
the information that we want to get out to them and communicate with
them and maintain relationships rather than just sort of saying goodbye
to them after four years.
MH: I would add to that, I
was involved in the development of a prospective student setup for the
University of North Carolina and they actually did a bunch of usability
testing on students where we had them go in and complete certain tasks
from the portal and then, you know, kind of go into other, you know,
with their feedback and how that compared with other different schools.
And it was amazing because the student feedback was, you know, "Wow!
I didn't realize this university was this sophisticated." So they were
essentially interacting with this online portal and making all sorts
of other value judgments about the teaching, learning and other quality
of the institution based on this online experience of the portal.
HS: Okay, in the very beginning,
Michael, you started talking about architecture, technology and the
business side of the thing. If we're going to build a portal, what are-I
mean, at a very high level-are the issues technology, business rules,
what-at that level, what are the issues that we have to worry about?
MH: Well, I think the first
issue is that there needs to be sort of a compelling vision and objective
for the portal. What is the audience, what sorts of functionality and
features are you going to sort of deliver and drive to this online-essentially,
your portal is your online service paradigm, it's your online service
delivery mechanism. Just as a person in a, you know, counter, delivering
service over a counter, the portal is, you know, the next generation
sort of version of a service counter. And so I think that's the first
thing is to have that sort of strong vision.
And I think on the technology side,
there needs to be, you know, this infrastructure and other things in
place to be able to deliver because I don't think, you know, content
in terms of static content is really defined for portals. You need to
define the portals interactive content and personalized contact, which
means you need to have access to all these different, disparate databases
that probably haven't been talking to each other before. So that really
involves, first of all, you know, sort of setting up what I would call
from a high level these sort of portal tools which I think a lot of
people are really focused on right now, and these are the things to
manage different sorts of channels that you might deliver to the portal,
things to manage customization, authentication-
HS: Could you give us-when
you say "portal tool"-
MH: The JA-SIG portal consortium
that's going on.
HS: Right, I mean, by portal
tool, do you mean the stuff that PeopleSoft delivers, or is that a different
kind of thing?
MH: Well, I would imagine that
is also a portal tool, but essentially the thing that sort of manages
the user interface is what I would call it, you know, a set of technologies
that really manages the user interface. So Pipeline would fall into
that category or PeopleSoft or Epicentric which is sort of more of a
tool that has less sort of packaged delivery things. It essentially
is the thing that allows you to build and customize the user interface
on the front end, manage special management, etc.
HS: That sounds like the kind
of thing that he new Portal Java and Administration special interest
group is calling a framework. Is that-
MH: I think that's fair.
HS: Is that what you think
Michael's talking about, Oren? Because I think you're involved with
that a little.
OS: Yeah. Yeah, we are involved
a little and I think that is what Michael's talking about. You know,
I think the other side of it is-I mean, that's one level of the tools
you need, and down below that, especially if you're trying to appeal
to multiple constituencies who shift relationships over time, there's
a tremendous amount of infrastructure that has to be in place to handle
a portal.
HS: Right.
OS: And we're talking about
multiple databases. You have to know that, you know, a person is the
same person as they move from being a prospective student to a student
to an alum. And I don't know about your campuses, but traditionally
at my campus, we haven't known that and so we're doing a lot of work
to try and put that stuff together. You have to have a single authentication
mechanism behind it also that can use the same ID forever and ever,
and you have to manage that somehow. And there's a lot of stuff you
need to grab and merge.
MH: There's also sort of this
idea, it's almost like a middleware environment because you're going
to be wanting to be able to grab data from multiple database systems
and you need to have some technology that sort of pulls some of that
stuff together, at least a common--you know, because you're going to
grab data that might be processed from one system and sort of combine
it with another. You need that and then also, on all the back end legacy
systems, you need to understand what the strategy is for actually accessing
this data. So going to the different vendors, understanding all of the
ATI's, etc.
HS: So it looks like what you're
saying, Michael and Oren, too, that this is going to cut across all
kinds of divisions, lines, whatever. This is going to grab data from
all over the university and things, so Pennie, since you weren't in
this particular part of the discussion, who's going to build this thing?
PT: The reason why I wasn't
in it is because we're really in a fortunate position at WPI to have
all of our alumni and all of our administrators and all of our students
and all of our prospective students in the same database. And so we
start from a really good position.
HS: And they all work together?
PT: Yes.
HS: But, right, so there's
only one group of people, the people who develop web pages are the same
people who-
PT: But we were talking about
the databases.
HS: Oh, okay.
PT: And back to what Oren said
in terms of having multiple systems on campus, and so from the standpoint
of having all these different databases work together, we have that.
What we've done is we've brought in different groups to get the initial
implementation going and our approach in terms of rolling out these
services to other constituents is to bring on constituent groups one
at a time and sort of build the portal interface for them. So right
now, we're looking at the teaching and learning environment, meaning
we're working with students, we're working with faculty and we're sort
of trying to work with them to customize and personalize that interface
for them. The same interface we're going to roll out to potentially,
I think, our alumni next and work with the Alumni Development Office
to determine what their needs are for their constituents.
HS: But there's one group doing
this portal thing, and that is-
PT: It's a cross-functional
group.
HS: In a number of universities,
there's a Web Development group, there's the academic side of the IT
house and there's the financial side of that, and all of those seem
to be candidates for building this thing.
PT: The IT-
HS: Michael, you've been involved
in a lot of universities. Who do you put in charge of this thing?
MH: Whoever is politically
the most powerful!
OS: A Machiavellian answer!
MH: I guess, seriously, though,
I think it is a very, very difficult piece. I think that was has sort
of happened by default is that the IT people have sort of assumed leadership
in most of these areas and the reason they've assumed, you know, leadership
in these areas is that they're really the, you know, sort of unique
organization that is the intersection of all these different business
functions because, you know, they have relationships for the most part
with the finance people, the student people, the academic people because,
you know, they are sort of the keepers of the system. So because of
that, I think they are sort of uniquely qualified to pull together those
different areas. HS They usually don't have the political support, but
they've got the relationships. OS I was going to say that, you know,
I think in many ways that is true in a lot of places as a natural outgrowth
of the fact that over the last ten or 15 years, many of us have combined
what used to be separate IT organizations into one and now we do have
those relationships. And so we're fortunate that we did that early on.
HS But even when you have one IT organization, just to push the point
once more here, is that an IT organization is often made up of several
groups, an academic side and a financial side. Now, when you said we'll
have the IT group do it, did you mean the financial folks, the folks
that have their hands in the databases, or do you mean those folks who
have just put up BlackBoard and have the student stuff in their hands?
Or did you mean the web development folks? They're all IT folks.
MH: Well, I think it's-I think
that question is, you know, you need to understand the context of the
university to determine where that should be. I know in my experience
at the University of Minnesota, we are sort of fortunate that I was
on the administrative side and we are able to deliver web registration
and some other functions up very early. And what that caused was that
we were able to create this portal brand called One Stop and we had
this ticket logo and some other things going on. And so we were able
to get that live and very quickly, more people were going to our homepage
than they were to the university's homepage. And so what happened is
that we were able to create a huge amount of momentum and then everybody
else wanted to go through our portal because they knew they were-it
was too late in the game to start up one that was competing.
Now, I think unfortunately at many
universities, you know, the academic side and the administrative side
might be at the same level and so there isn't really any competition,
which I think really leads to one of the fundamental problems that's
going on in universities in terms of the portal development. And that
is, primarily this has all been a grass-roots level. You know, there's
no president out there that I've seen today or VP of Academic affairs
that says, "We're going to have an integrated portal strategy and the
university's all going to get behind this thing. So what's happening
is that these different initiatives are coming up from the grass-roots
level so you have the colleges doing their own portals and you have
the academic side doing their portals and students keep doing their
portals and what they immediately see is that the true value of the
portal is to co-opt more services into their portal. So they immediately
sort of come out and then try to co-opt all of these other people and
kind of like steal their services and all this other stuff and create
this incredible amount of tension that's building up in universities
all over the country.
And that's why this is such a big
deal, that these things-and I think what's going to happen now is that
senior vice presidents and presidents and other people that are in,
I think, higher levels of positions of power at institutions are just
going to look around and sort of see what's going on and for the first
time, they're going to have to address these problems besides saying,
"Just decentralize it," which, you know, you can't decentralize your
portal strategy. And that's the tendency of every university is to decentralize
everything. So I think that's what's going to happen and then I think
over the next two years, we're going to see a little bit more leadership
coming into play, because otherwise you would-I mean, the university's
just going to self-destruct over this issue because there's going to
be no resolution.
HS: Let me-
OS: I just wanted to say that
on our campus we do have buy-ins from the very top level of management
and when we've shown it to them, they've grasped the implications right
away and are very excited about it. Not that that makes any of these
conversations with other disparate groups on campus any easier-
HS: Right.
PT: The same here. I mean,
we have cross-functional groups in place now, like our implementation
strategy forum and it'll get to a point where someone might want to
say, "Well, okay, now who's going to control it and maintain it beyond
here?"
MH: But I think that's the
point where this makes it so difficult because universities are not
used to working in cross-departmental teams.
PT: Correct.
MH: They're not used to managing
projects in a matrix environment and working, you know, together there.
So you know, this brings in all sorts of the things that I think are
going to make this transition. But I think on the positive side, it's
very interesting because I think in some cases, this whole philosophy
is going to change the universities forever, because I think the fact
that these departments are sort of working together for the first time
on the Web initiative is probably going to open the door for some other
things. But that's off-topic, but it's interesting.
TC: This is Terry. I agree
with Michael entirely. It's off-topic but it's a big issue, the changes
that portals are going to demand.
I wanted to remind our listeners out
in Virtual Land that they can send us questions at expert@cren.net and
those of us in the audience can pass up their written questions to me.
We have
a question from Laurentian University, Professor Richard Denison. He
wants us to talk more about portals and teaching and learning.
HS: Michael?
MH: Well, I'm on administrative,
so I'm the wrong person to ask.
HS: Okay, Pennie.
PT: Yeah, I'm actually on the
teaching and learning side. I guess I am the right person. At least
that's where we start.
HS: That's why we have three
people here! So we can have the right person.
PT: Our approach in terms of
looking at portals was to figure out what teaching and learning environment
best met our needs and then jump from there. And through that process,
we involved our faculty and received their buy-in on purchasing a product
that-we were fortunate enough to also have had a portal strategy behind
us and so the teaching and learning environment really drove our decision
for portal selection. There were different-what other universities have
done. Our administrative systems were actually much more further developed
than our academic systems were with regards to web interfaces. We had
implemented a lot of the enterprise products for business a couple years
ago so the register online, drop online, pay online was an area that's
been in existence in our university for a long time. But teaching and
learning online had not, and getting those constituents to work comfortably
in that environment was our primary goal.
HS: So tell us what you did.
PT: Well, last year, we surveyed
course management systems, we didn't survey portal systems. And did
some research on what was available, brought some vendors in, and when
all was said and done, we selected BlackBoard's Course Info product
back then. And fortunate enough that they had a strategy for an outcome
based on your portal technology.
HS: But when you got it, it
didn't, right?
PT: No. No, it didn't. We brought
the teaching and learning environment first, the enterprise product
was in existence but we were bringing on the teaching and learning environment
first and then we migrated to the portal once we were comfortable in
that environment.
HS: And Oren? What-was the
same sort of thing happening at UW?
OS: Well, we started our teaching
and learning, sort of web-based teaching and learning stuff about four
and a half years ago and at that time, none of the packaged systems
really met our full range of needs as a large research university. So
we started building our own set of tools called the Catalyst tools,
which are now fairly well developed and what we're working on now is
actually trying to integrate those tools into our portal framework and
that's sort of the next design we're working on is how faculty, teaching
faculty will get to those tools and manage their own student portal.
And so we're not there yet, but soon.
HS: Is the system that you
have, Pennie, up and running now?
PT: Yes.
HS: I mean, you have a portal?
PT: We're BlackBoard 5, level
three implementation so there's-
HS: And the portal is up and
running?
PT: Correct.
HS: And it is being used just
for the students, or is it being used for everybody? I mean, does it
have hooks into your back end administrative stuff?
PT: Right now, we're passing
our students, we're passing our faculty, we're passing our admin. We're
not passing alumni and we're not passing prospective students yet.
HS: But you're planning to
do that?
PT: Yes.
HS: Was that hard to do? Was
it hard to hook the stuff into your other systems? I mean, I can believe
it was easy to do the student stuff, because it was built for that.
PT: No, actually, I've asked
and we're working real close with our administrative computing group
because this thing's got to go across functional lines or you're not
going to be successful and the response is, you know, it took about
40 hours worth of manpower to get it done.
HS: And people are actually
using it.
PT: Yes.
HS: So I'll ask anyway. Is
there some-do we have a URL so folks who are listening could look at
it, if they were to take a peek at it?
PT: Yes, if they go to http://my.wpi.edu
and you can get in through the guest login.
HS: Okay, is that on our website,
Terry? That's great.
TC: Yes.
HS: So if you go out to the
CREN website you'll be able to go off and check Pennie's claims here.
PT: Yes, and it-
HS: See how good this works!
PT: Right, well, and faculty,
some faculty have turned off guest services and other faculty let you
in, so you have to sort of tool around the site to figure out who's
letting you in and who's not.
HS: Okay, we have a question
from the audience but the person did not give me their name. But since
we have a live audience here, I can ask.
HS: Okay, Don Spicer from where,
Don?
DS: University of Maryland.
HS: Okay, Don Spicer from Maryland
asked the question that probably Oren is going to at least take a poke
at, I think. The question is, what is the importance of the Java SIG
Initiative? That's the initiative to build a thing they're calling New
Portal which is some kind of framework. The Java SIG Initiative for
the development of portals at non-participating institutions. So I think,
Don, what you're saying is those folks that are not members of JASIG.
Oren?
OS: Howard, you're probably
better qualified to answer.
HS: Well, we're going to argue
about who's better qualified. I think it's you!
OS: You know, we're currently
watching the Java SIG stuff very carefully, although we're not using
it yet. And you know, I think the potential importance of having an
open framework that anybody can grab and has open source code and written
across platform languages is really tremendous for the people who are
members or people who aren't. I mean, I think that those available-you
don't have to be a member to grab the code. You have to be a member
if you want to participate in the development.
HS: Yeah, one thing, I actually
stopped by the IBS booth that's here and one of the things I saw-and
in fact, one of the things they told me that I was a little surprised
to hear was they said the code was free to JASIG members. I thought
the code was going to be free to everyone, so I was surprised to see
and hear that.
OS: Memberships are free.
HS: No, but-oh, membership
in JASIG is free?
OS: Yes.
HS: Oh, okay.
OS: Yeah, I would just say
that being a member doesn't mean anything. I mean, I think you just
fill out a little Web form and it takes two seconds and you're a member.
I mean, so I think the issue of being a member or non-member doesn't
mean anything.
But I think the importance of it is
that there's, you know, I think a number of people in the higher ed
community that are really focused in on this vision of shareable development
and that in this area, that the universities are going to be better
off if they work together to share some of this code. And you know,
they've had some meetings here at EDUCAUSE this week and there was actually
some kind of exciting stuff last night. They were actually meeting with
a member of the higher education community-oh, sorry, the Department
of Education that's involved in putting a lot of the financial aid services
from the federal databases open and online. And they actually really
got it. They are going to, like, develop this little API tools that
you can pull down at the university and integrate into your portal.
So they're talking about developing some portal channels that would
be able to display faster information and other things, not from a Department
of Ed website, but actually delivered through your local portal.
We're trying to work with the different
portal communities to set up standards for content and other sorts of
things which then can be delivered through the portals in the higher
ed community. So I think it's a very exciting thing. I think the big
challenge for the job is going to be able to maintain the interests
of the universities participating in it and insure that the universities
involved are still continuing to commit, you know, staff members and
resources into the ongoing development and maintenance of the software.
But I think it's a very, very worthwhile vision.
TC: Okay, I have another question
here. This is from Larry [inaudible], Learning and [inaudible] Group
in [inaudible] Minnesota. He'd like to hear the experts talk more about
what they see as the contrast between academic university portals and
corporate university portals, if there are any.
HS: Michael? Or Oren? Or whoever?
PT: I don't think there are
a lot of differences. I mean, I think corporations and universities
both have disparate groups that they want to bring together in some
fashion and push targeted information to in some way. And so if you
can take a generic view of a portal for being able to bring together
people, information and processes, well, then both corporations and
higher ed have those needs.
MH Yeah, but if the question is what's the difference between portals
at the university and of the university vs., you know, there's a whole
school of commercial companies out there now that are coming to us and
saying, "We want to be your portal. Just give us your data and we'll
be your portal." And it's striking, though, that the heart of the difference
is, we know a lot about our people.
PT: But we want to know more.
MH: And we want to know more,
and we have a certain tradition to maintain about what we do with that
data, what we know about people, you know, and there are going to be
a lot of hard decisions that we're all going to have to make. I mean,
does that mean you don't shove any advertising to people? Or are we
only going to shove, you know, tasteful advertising to people for some
definition of tasteful? You know, but we've looked at these things and
the fact that we can actually tailor the stuff, we tailor the content
of the information to what we know about the people is critical to make
the portal a success. And the commercial companies either can't do that
or they can only do it if we give them our data, and I think we all
have to be-I'm not saying we don't want to ever give our data and share
our data with people who can do things for us, but I think we all have
to be very, very careful about the conditions with which we're willing
to part with our data.
HS: Yeah.
PT: I'm not sure I understood
the question, then, because I was asked what the difference between
a corporate portal and a university portal, not necessarily whether
or not you let a commercial product come into your university.
MH: Yeah, well, I think it
was a corporate university portal.
OS: Yeah.
HS: Yeah, he used the phrase
"corporate university," but I think we've come back to the question
that when anybody uses the word "portal," it's a little ambiguous about
exactly what people mean, and it can mean a lot of things.
MH: And so you mean by a corporate
university, you're referring to a university providing degree programs
at the corporation or a corporation has set up a portal to deal with
corporate training for their company?
PT: Well, we're talking about
commercialization of the university portal.
MH: I don't know, I'm not a
big fan of it.
HS: Well, that's kind of, "This
is how I feel." Why aren't you a big fan of it?
MH: Why, because-
HS: What's bad about it?
MH: There's sound principles
and reasoning behind that feeling.
HS: That's what we'd like to
get, sound principles and reasoning, Michael.
MH: Well, I just think from
a university standpoint, the value and the brand of the university is
something that's being sold over the portal and typically, when you're
selling a brand, you don't confuse it by mixing other brands with it.
I mean, when Pepsi is selling their advertising, they don't have a Frito-Lay,
Dorito chip on the ad with Pepsi. I mean, it's a very pure brand sort
of sales [inaudible]. And I think at the university, it's the same thing.
You've got a university brand that's being sold through the portal and
I think it does really cheapen the brand to add commercial advertising
and other things. Now, I think around sports, that's okay, which is
sort of the periphery. And, you know, on the side of the university
buses, fine, because that's periphery. But if you're talking about the
core business of the university, which is education, student services,
those two sorts of things, I think that those are the things that you
do not want to sort of advertise on your site.
HS: Do you agree, Pennie?
PT: I agree. We don't use the
advertising, and again, our strategy has been to come from the teaching
and learning environment. To introduce commercialization into that environment
is almost sacrilegious.
HS: Doesn't BlackBoard say
to you that it'd be cheaper if you did?
PT: Yeah, it does, and you're
right. And I think that-
HS: And you just have all the
money you need, right?
PT: Well, no, but, you know,
there's already enough happening on the web to sort of distract students
from being able to learn and we don't want to add to that distraction.
I think, though, I think having the possibility or the availability
of commercial-adding commercials to that website is a good thing, though,
as long as you can turn it off because there are some universities who
will never be able to sort of move ahead with this strategy if that
particular feature isn't there. And so I'm in favor of it, but as long
as it's optional.
HS: I want to propose this
question and I think it's an instructive one. If we know, for instance,
that a student has a permanent address that's in Los Angeles and come
November, one of the airline companies comes to us and says, "We'd like
to make know to your students that we've got specials going for the
holidays to Los Angeles," is this overt commercialization? Is it beyond
the pale to inform that student of that opportunity, or is that really
a useful service? And I don't think we know the answer to that yet.
MH: But I think the way to
handle that is to have a section in your portal that deals with, you
know, student life or travel services or something else and then you
link into, you know, the greatest airfares of the week. But it's not,
you know, an advertisement that's posted on your registration page.
It's a targeted task that you think a lot of students are going to do
and you put it someplace in a logical navigational tree where they know
how to find it.
HS: So it's not commercialization
per se, it's the [inaudible] rampant commercialization we worry about.
MH Exactly.
PT: And then again, that sort
of commercialization goes back to this sort of, you know, an audience
of many or an audience of one, and with adding commercials to your website,
you're sort of backing away from what some of the advantage of a portal
is.
HS: Who should make the decision?
Not the IT people, certainly. Who should make the decision about whether
you're going to do this or not?
PT: About the advertising?
HS: Yeah.
MH: A committee.
HS: A committee. A typical
university solution to a problem.
MH: I think it's the only way
it'll work.
HS: We'll get enough people
together.
PT: But Michael, but there
is some truth to what Michael said. You need to have some of these cross-functional
groups working together on this and the committee's got to come to some
consensus about that.
HS: Yeah.
MH: But I'd hope there'd be
just more than-
HS: Okay, we have a question
from the audience from Carl Berger at-is it Berger? Carl Berger? Yeah,
okay. Yeah, his question we could talk about for the rest of the night,
but if we could handle this briefly, we're actually running out of time
here and so we're going to-Terry says, let's keep going until we run
out of tape here, which we could easily do. Okay. Carl says, "How do
you determine who in a university gets to put information on the portal?"
He wants us to consider things like legal issues and ethical issues
and things like that. Is there anything new or special that we have
to do to do that?
PT: We have certain groups
at the university who own, I guess we want to think of it that way,
certain pieces of information within our databases and we'll probably
go back to the keepers of those information if we start to address differences
in policy.
HS: But what if somebody says,
"Gee, what I could do is I'd like to put this little stock ticker thing."
I think that's the thing that Carl-Carl is nodding over here. Something
we could not see when somebody sends in an e-mail question. Okay, but
where somebody says, "I want the weather or, you know, I want something
about--you know, I'd like Time magazine. Hey, they have a really
nice site and I'd like it as a channel out here, or I'd like some news
service" or something like that.
PT: In terms of mandating what
shows up there or-
HS: No, saying, is it okay
or will the university provide it? I mean, if you-for example, the New
York Times will let you have a channel. I mean, they'll let you
hook into the New York Times news service as a channel. The university
could do that and then provide that as a channel to folks in the portal.
Who's going to decide-
PT: I think the user-
HS: --if that's okay, or which
ones-
PT: I think the user should
decide.
HS: So you-you'll make the
user do it themselves?
PT: We-well, within the BlackBoard
environment, there are certain modules that we sort of mandate for each
different constituent, and then beyond that, they can customize what
that look is. And so they could pick a weather module and put it there,
or if they don't want weather, they leave it-
MH: I would answer this, I
think there's two components. If the content is free, most portals have
a place where you could have customized bookmarks, where you could actually
enter an URL and then it shows up. And so I think from that standpoint,
the user could decide. I think on some of the other ones that are paid,
it is a very tricky issue and I think once again, one of the challenges
for all universities is that there is no one that is in charge of this
portal. There's no one in charge of enterprise service to everybody,
and so what happens is, there's no decisionmaking ability to even make
that decision, you know, process. I think one of the things that needs
to happen, not only on the development side, but also for an ongoing
process is to set up a representative committee that meets to discuss
these issues. I think in addition, the best place to go for this is
to develop some process where you do focus groups and usability tests
where you actually run people through some of those different areas,
so I think that would help as well.
HS: But doesn't it change things
a little when we have a bunch of channels? This is not-I mean, this
is not a homepage anymore.
PT: No.
OS: No, it's not a homepage,
but what I'm saying is that we have structures within the university
that to some extent provide for making those decisions, so it's a question
of navigating through those structures and seeing if any of them are
applicable and then, if not, as Michael suggests, we need some new structures
to handle those decisions.,
PT: But I don't think the process
is all that much different from when universities were trying to figure
out what should go on the homepage of the university when they were
starting to develop web pages and who should make those decisions.
MH: Well, Pennie, except I
think those initial groups were very-not the right representatives.
I mean, like, I looked at the one that I participated in. The makeup
was so bizarre, I don't know who picked these people. But I think that-
HS: With a committee, I think,
Michael.
MH: Exactly! But I think that
you need to have involvement of the most senior level people in the
university making these decisions. These, I think, decisions in the
first web committees were viewed as being unimportant and so typically,
I saw, you know, lower level people on those groups and I think now
you need some of that senior leadership involved.
HS: Okay, we're-
OS: You know, we would say,
"Well, are you a registered student organization? And if you are, we'll
let you post your channel, and if you're not, you know, go see the people
in Student Affairs and they'll tell you what you do to get registered
and then you can do it."
HS: Okay, we're actually past
the end of what should be the webcast but we're still recording this
stuff and it will still be archived and we're going to try to fit one
more question onto the archive, which I know we can do. So for our final
question-this is like Final Jeopardy, I guess, here-if you're a university
and you really either have just started to look at portals or you haven't
looked at them at all-which is hard to believe, that you haven't heard
all this good stuff here, how do you get started? Where do you go? What's
the first couple steps you take to get involved in this in a way that's
reasonable? Michael?
MH: I would suggest first sort
of determining an individual, very high up, to sort of sponsor the web
project.
HS: Is that the president?
MH: The president would be
the perfect candidate. And especially, you know-assuming the president's
powerful.
HS: There'll be another discussion.
MH: At another session, right.
So it'd have some high level sponsorship. Put together some sort of
planning team, and I would either first do a sort of a design session
where you pull together a navigation, do the discipline of putting together
site maps and the other tools surrounding web and portal development,
and then go out and look at a technology infrastructure to build upon.
Do that as a separate process and then once you're done with that planning
phase, then start to build. I think that's one of the challenges is
that you need to go through that discipline in that order.
HS: You didn't mention anything
about going out and buying a PeopleSoft portal or buying a-
MH: Well, I think that comes
part of the analysis. I mean, how do you know what you're going to buy
if you don't know what your needs are, if you don't know what your end
objective and your end vision is? So, you know, I think you need to
have a sense of that and then go out and look. Does PeopleSoft meet
it, does BlackBoard meet it, do you need to build your own? You know,
what are your financial resources, what is the financial commitment?
And then once you understand all those things, you'll have the information
to make a decision.
PT: I agree with Michael in
terms of identifying a champion at the university. I don't necessarily
know if it has to be the president, per se, but someone at-someone senior
enough that can sort of, you know, drive the project and get people
to work together cross-functional [inaudible] needs today. The strategy
I would suggest that varies a little bit from Michael's is that I would
look at what you can currently do over the web and find out where you
may have some gaps and start there with a portal implementation in mind.
And if, for example, you already have nice, strong administrative services
available through some single point of entry, then don't necessarily
go to portal technologies and focus there. Go the opposite end, maybe
to the teaching and learning environment, and get something that works
there that can tie back into that [inaudible] developed strategy.
OS: Okay, so I would suggest
yet a third approach, which is interesting in itself, I guess. You know,
I think what can help jump-start the process is some form of rapid prototyping
and if you can get a group of like-minded people from across a number
of functions together, they don't have to be, you know, the highest
level of people, but they have to be, you know, people with the sort
of big picture ability. And you can get them, you know, using whatever
technology is easiest for you, start putting up some sort of prototype.
It can be just a static mockup or it can be something that has a limited
amount of interactivity and personalization. And start just tossing
ideas around and then take those ideas out and start showing them to
people. And I think you'll generate enough interest and excitement that
you'll then be able to have the conversation that will lead to the deeper
levels of the project that Michael and Pennie talked about.
HS: I think it's wonderful
that none of you mentioned things like Java Servlets or any of the nitty-gritty
of the technology which I think IT folks are all too ready to start
doing before they address the issues that all three of you addressed
first. I think that was-those were great answers, great non-technology,
nitty-gritty answers, and I think really the right place to start, even
though we had three different answers.
TC: Well, I'm considered a
really tough dad, but I don't know how Judith sets down this conversation
week after week. But it's time for our closing notes. Be sure to set
aside Thursdays at 4:00 PM Eastern Time for the series of Tech Talks.
Listening to us is always a great excuse for not having to attend another
meeting at that time! Our next session, only one week from today-next
Thursday-features a well-know expert, Alex Hills-he's been on Tech Talk
before-from Carnegie Mellon University, on wireless technology and campus
implementations. If you want to set up a wireless LAN on campus, he'll
discuss the realities that you'll want to know about. This one really
will be at 4:00 PM Eastern Time next Thursday.
Many thanks
to our three guest experts today, Oren Sreebny of the University of
Washington, Michael Handberg from PriceWaterhouse Coopers, and Pennie
Turgeon of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, plus this great crowd here
in the audience. And thanks again to our sponsor, BlackBoard, Inc. Many
thanks, too, to all the institutions who support these Tech Talks through
their memberships in CREN, the Corporation for Research in Educational
Networking. A special thanks to our technology anchor, Howard Strauss;
to Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the rest of the support team at
Merit Network; to Susie Berneis, audio file transcriber.
Also we had extra assistance this
week dealing with the logistics from the EDUCAUSE staff and Davis Audio-Visual.
My personal thanks go out to Randy Richter and others. And finally,
a thanks to all of you for being here, physically and virtually. You
were here Because It's Time. Bye!
MH: Bye.
HS: Thank you, Michael. Thank
you, Pennie. Thank you, Oren.
END OF WEBCAST
