Why have a portal at Nottingham?

Introduction	E-Learning	Structured Data Services	The University Website
School Intranets	The changing web	A virtuous circle	Living in harmony with existing services

Introduction

“A portal is a personalized and customized gateway designed for useful and comprehensive access to information, people, and processes. While portals have a rapidly evolving set of features and characteristics, they can be described as personalized and customized user interfaces providing access to both internal and external information. Portal content can include a wide variety of features, information, tools, and communication devices”. [1]

Compass is the project name for the creation of a personalised student portal at the University of Nottingham. It is aimed to be the ‘one stop shop’ for a student, containing an easy and coherent route through to all the online information and services relevant to their life, whether academic or as a member of the Nottingham community. It will link to the e-Learning resources for each module and allow access to the administrative functions, such as notifying changes of address, or checking up on debt. It will contain a mix of channels, some which are obligatory, but many which may be chosen by the student, ranging from societies’ information to local entertainment.

(NB: The image obove is included to illustrate a generic portal, using tabs and channels. Neither content nor appearance is indicative of the final Compass specification.)

Compass will provide a mixture of existing services, packaged as seamlessly as possible, and some that have not been available to students before. It will take the opportunity to remove some inconsistencies from the presentation of information to students, but also to examine the appropriateness of existing administrative workflow within an electronic environment. Many of the activities and services that will be published through Compass are already available to students, but not in a co-ordinated fashion and not from within a single integrated interface.

A portal has many characteristics, but essentially just one concept – that of integration. Relevant information is consolidated together into one cohesive page, or set of frames, as a set of channels. The student is able to subscribe to those that they find useful and unsubscribe from those they don’t consider important (with a few obvious exceptions!)

1. Provosts on Portals: a web seminar developed for American Association of State Colleges and Universities provosts http://weber.edu/portals/executive_summary.htm.

http://www.eis.nottingham.ac.uk/compass/

eis