Building the Student Portal at Nottingham
updated: Nov 2002
| Introduction | E-Learning | Structured Data Services |
The University Website |
| School Intranets | The changing web | A virtuous circle | Living in harmony with existing services |
The University has a number of databases, being a mix of commercially developed and bespoke systems. The web has presented a challenge to most systems, and the response has been to develop web based interfaces, one per system. It may be acceptable for a frequent user, and they may indeed prefer the specialisation that a custom interface can offer, but a casual user, say the student who just wants to update an address once a year, has to identify the appropriate system and work their way through an unfamiliar interface. An alternative strategy is to do away with the presentation layer of all these systems, and to combine them within a single coherent system. The portal provides such an approach, and by making the data much more visible to the students, it is anticipated that they will ensure that it is much more accurate. There is, however, a corresponding obligation on the underlying systems. As the user perceives an integrated system, they will feel it unreasonable to update different parts of that system with the same information. Thus if they use the ‘Change Personal Details’ channel to notify a change of address, their perception is not that ‘an entry is changed within Saturn’ but that they have ‘told the University’ and might expect that all systems were updated. Compass needs to ensure the appropriate workflow is in place to achieve that.
http://www.eis.nottingham.ac.uk/compass/
eis
