Portals in education

Print Article
Citation
, XML
Auteurs
  • Strijker Allard
  • Strijker-Fisser Petra

Abstract

Because of the increasing use of digital information within educational organizations, users encounter problems with finding and selecting the right information. Therefore, the request for personalized information becomes an important issue. Portals are seen as a solution because they can combine various information channels in a personalized way. This was also the conclusion of a recent research in which several Portals were compared with each other (Keller, 2004[1]) to identify why Portals are necessary

Because of
the increasing use of digital information within educational organizations,
users encounter problems with finding and selecting the right information.
Therefore, the request for personalized
information becomes an important issue. Portals are seen as a solution
because they can combine various information channels in a personalized way (Strijker & Fisser, 2006[1]).
This was also the conclusion of a recent research in which several Portals were
compared with each other (Keller, 2004[2]) to identify why Portals are necessary

  • Management of content
    (web-based content, documents and administrative dates, authorisations,
    versions, fields and workflow);
  • Uniform access (identification,
    authentication, single sign on);
  • Integration of applications:
    E-mail, electronic learning
    environments, SIS. CRM, ERP, LDAP, application integration and data
    integration);
  • Collaboration (e-mail, communities, forums, chat, shared folders, video/audio, metadata, taxonomies, classification of material).

Several
definitions (Strijker & Koopal, 2005[3]) of Portals are given in the
literature and most of the definitions include the use of different resources,
personalized information, and the use of a single interface. A definition that
covers various aspects and that is used in this article is the following:

A Portal is a system that integrates various
applications and retrieves information from different resources to end users
through a personalized interface (Keller, 2004).

The use of
Portals in education relates to
different closely-related aspects such as educational, organizational, and
technical procedures. This article describes the current status of the
educational implementation of
Portals in higher education in the Netherlands in relation to these educational,
organizational, and technical aspects.

Meta