The New Information Frontier – The Personalized Portal

Timothy J. Foley, Director Client Computing & Library Services, Lehigh University

Bruce Taggart, Vice Provost Library and Technology Services, Lehigh University

 

Abstract

Institutions face maintaining and integrating multiple vendor or in-house systems, to support learning, finance, HR, financial aid, alumni, and student services.  Creating a common gateway to these services while enhancing general campus communications is central to Lehigh’s portal strategy. While many “off-the-shelf” portal vendor solutions exist, institutions need to tackle internal cultural issues if they want to achieve an integrated enterprise portal. This paper addresses how to manage both the cultural issues and the technical issues of a single, integrated enterprise system portal, and extend the value of an institution’s existing technology investments.

 

About Lehigh

Lehigh University is located in Bethlehem, PA. Founded in 1865 with 4700 undergraduates, 1200 graduate students, 400 faculty, and 1200 staff across four Colleges (Arts & Sciences, Engineering, Business & Economics, and Education), Lehigh is known as a leader in the use of innovative technology to advance teaching, learning and research. Lehigh ranks 37th among 248 national universities in U.S News & World Report's "2004 America's Best Colleges" survey.

 

Lehigh’s portal vision

Lehigh envisions the portal as a single point of service to access different types of personalized information. Portal information is presented based on an individual’s role at the university. Faculty, student, staff, college, or major field of study are role examples.  A portal is designed to eliminate the need to "drill down" through many layers of web pages to find relevant information. In an ideal world, the portal presents information as needed rather than requiring the user to search for it.  With today’s information overload, the true power of information resides in the quality of the information one receives not the quantity of information one can find.

 

Lehigh’s vision is an intelligent portal that changes based on a person's usage patterns. An intelligent portal incorporates “push" technology, which informs the user of information when it becomes available based on his or her personal profile. For instance, if students are wait-listed for courses, they would be notified through the portal as soon as a place becomes available. Overall campus communications would also be improved by having a central point to broadcast campus-wide and targeted information rather than using campus mail.

 

Content is the major driver of Lehigh’s portal development. Lehigh’s content development team is headed by a librarian who works with the Lehigh community on the best types of information to be placed on the portal.  Key areas such as Student Affairs and Human Resources were the first major areas contacted to work on content development.  One of the major goals of the portal is to build campus community by the establishment of a campus intranet. The portal has single sign on to our administrative systems, course management systems, email, calendar, and library systems. Personalization of channels, tabs, and communication is accomplished through roles that are available through the administrative system.  Group features with file sharing, calendaring, announcements, discussion boards are available for student organizations, athletic teams and departments.  For example the volleyball and soccer teams use the portal’s group features to schedule practices and post training schedules. The graduate student life advisor is working with the content team to utilize the group and calendar tools of the portal to build a closer community. Community bulletin boards exist for rides, used books and items for sale.  The campus life channel has links to local activities, a movie channel, Lehigh Arts Center, and dining services menus.

 

The future of portal development at Lehigh is to provide personalized portal applications for prospectus students, alumni and life long learners.

 

Cultural and Technical Issues

One of the first challenges a campus faces in implementing a portal is dissemination of what a portal is and how it differs from static web pages. A major effort needs to be made to ensure campus buy-in to the project.  Lehigh started building this buy-in by having key stakeholders representing all areas of the University involved in the initial portal decision making process.  Buy-in was enhanced by having people see the available tools and then coming up with ideas for how the portal might best suit their needs.  Some good examples are the work that was done with Athletics, Human Resources and the College Deans.  Athletics saw the tools available to them in the group features of the portal and felt that this would be a great way for coaches to communicate with their athletes.   Human Resources embarked on a major project to rewrite every staff job description at Lehigh and concluded that a portal channel would be the best way to communicate with the staff about these changes as well as provide a secure environment for the job description process.  Another way to get buy-in from departments is to give them their own area on the portal.  To date, Student Affairs is responsible for the Campus Life tab, Human Resources is responsible for the Employee tab, and each College is working on developing their own College based tab.  We also have a First Year Student tab described in more detail later in this paper.  A key to all of these projects has been that they are user initiated rather than mandated from above.

 

The technical issues associated with a portal project are ongoing. When clients enter an institution’s portal, they are greeted with what appears to be a seamless fabric of integrated and accessible services and resources. However, beneath the tapestry of the portal lie disconnected auxiliary databases and applications. This is the layer where the next evolution of integration must occur in order for institutions to achieve a true single enterprise system where data and messages are exchanged in real time. Indeed, the evolution of the portal is creating the need and the issues surrounding integration of systems “behind the scenes.”  Lehigh is committed to following open source and standard-based solutions to achieve true interoperability.

 

Portal Implementation Overview

In January of 2001, Lehigh embarked on a study of institutional portals with the hopes of integrating its administrative systems and course management software into a single system that would provide students, faculty, and staff with a personalized, role-based view of the university. Another goal of this project was to create an online community that would be central to the campus life, providing communications tools to all available campus services and groups.

 

After a thorough review of the current portal solutions, in December of 2001 the cabinet level technology steering committee decided to buy a portal solution rather than build a home grown portal using open source software. The committee concluded that this was the most cost effective approach, as it was estimated that two additional programmers would have been required to build an open source portal locally. Another key factor in the decision was finding a vendor that was committed to following open source standards while providing development support and tools to quickly implement an integrated portal solution.   Lehigh’s decision was to purchase the SCT Luminis portal.  The Luminis portal followed the JA-SIG uPortal open source standards and also already integrated with Lehigh’s SCT Banner administrative systems.   

 

Implementation Details

Four teams were formed to implement the portal. 

 

 

Lehigh’s portal implementation began in April of 2002.  During the summer of 2002 Lehigh beta-tested the Luminis II product, subsequently available for pilot testing in the fall 2002. The librarian-led content team took the initial steps to create channels that they felt would be most useful to the campus. Over fifty initial channels were developed before we solicited client feedback.  Pilot groups from all areas of the campus were then chosen to test the channels and comment on other types of channel that they felt would be useful. Training was held throughout the fall semester. The campus community at large was also given the opportunity to comment on the channels and their development during the fall semester.   Major enhancements since that time have been the First Year Student Portal and the creation of the MyLibrary Portal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First Year Student Portal

 

Lehigh’s goal to personalize our portal to the needs of each individual user and to make it their primary institution resource was reinforced with the plans to develop the First Year Student Portal (FYS).   The (FYS) Portal was used to conduct our summer freshman orientation completely online, and was by the Registrar and the Associate Deans.  All the resources that freshmen needed, -- “meeting” with counselors, determining their computing and libraries needs, to gathering information on residence halls and food services -- were made available online. A special course scheduling module that followed a “turbo tax” model was developed to allow students to pick their first year courses.  As they moved through the module, students were asked questions and followed certain paths that clarified what courses they could and could not take. The students even took their calculus readiness exams online; results were used to determine what level of math they should take. The information presented to each student was personalized based roles derived from our SCT Banner Student system. First year arts and sciences majors were presented with college-specific resources in addition to general information about the university; similarly, engineering majors saw course information related to their area of study. By eliminating our summer on-campus orientation, we saved the university considerable expense while saving new students and their parents the time and cost of an additional trip to Lehigh. The response to the FYS portal from students, deans, and others was overwhelmingly positive. Over 90 percent of the students found the portal information useful or very useful. Equally important, this early and extensive interaction with our portal indoctrinated the freshmen to view the portal as their initial and primary source for campus information and resources.

 

MyLibrary Portal

 

 

The next major development is the MyLibrary portal tab which will go live August of 2004. The MyLibrary portal is an open source initiative, started by Eric Lease Morgan from University of Notre Dame. Lehigh is partnering with Notre Dame to implement this within the SCT Luminis portal. Currently, some faculty view the portal as simply a place to read the New York Times headlines, to check the sale bulletin board, to access their courses, or to view the weather forecast. This library application will pull them into the portal and help them understand its potential as a powerful, personalized resource. The application integrates and personalizes various library resources through the portal.  For example, a physics instructor will be presented with all the electronic journals, databases, and library contacts pertinent to his or her field of study. A math instructor will be presented totally different, tailored resources. This is accomplished through integration at the presentation level and through the portal integration.  Students will also be presented with this resource. A music major, for example, will see library catalogs and holdings that relate specifically to music. A very powerful aspect of MyLibrary is that new content will be dynamically offered to faculty or students based on their discipline. In addition, users can customize their page to limit the displayed resources to those they are personally interested in.  By placing MyLibrary in the portal, we are offering instant possibilities for personalization and customization of library resources.

 

Future Portal Developments

 

Our next portal development project will be the creation of an “admitted” student portal.  This idea came from Lehigh’s president after he had seen a presentation on the portal and its features. This portal will build community before students have formally committed to Lehigh and may positively impact our yield. Admitted students will have a communication portal that is directed and personalized for them as they decide about attending Lehigh. The primary content developer for the “admitted student portal” will naturally be the Admissions Office. As a student progresses through Lehigh, the student’s portal presence will mirror his/her personal journey of student life and academic growth.  After the admitted student portal is developed, Lehigh will begin to work on developing an Alumni portal. Ultimately, portal technology will support and enhance community building and communications from the time a student first shows interest in Lehigh until he/she has graduated and joined the ranks of Lehigh Alumni.