Annexure A - OER Africa

Best Practice in Education Portals
Research Document Prepared for the Commonwealth of Learning and Schoolnet

| |[pic]2002

The South African Institute for Distance Education


P O Box 31822, BRAAMFONTEIN, 2017
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url :http://www.saide.org.za

Best Practice in Education Portals


Introduction

A key feature of the ongoing growth of the Worldwide Web over the past five
years has been a proliferation of web portals that focus on supporting
school education. While many such sites require subscription and
registration, there are large numbers that deliver services free of charge
to anyone with Internet access. This research project has focused on
identifying a representative sample of these sites, describing the services
that they offer, and distilling an understanding of emerging best practice.
In completing the latter task, we have not constrained ourselves to data
gathered during this research project, although all of that data is
attached as an annexure to this report. Thus, summary of the best ideas we
have found - which is also informed by several prior years of research and
experimentation by the South African Institute for Distance Education
(SAIDE) - is presented in this report.

A Note on Terminology

The term 'portal' appears to have gained growing currency as a concept in
recent years. The difficulty with this term is that it remains
tantalizingly vague. As is pointed out in an article on Florida
International University's web site:

According to Doug Benzine, CUNA Service Group's director of e-
commerce, "There's no one set definition of a Web portal." He states
that "The field is so new that all companies involved in e-commerce
still are struggling with the definition and attempting to determine
what kinds of business plans even would work in an Internet
environment. They're basically playing it by ear, forming the rules as
they go along."


Nevertheless, portals are defined by a few key characteristics. They
seem to be hot sites on the Internet that serve as "search engines or
robotic Web crawlers" that categorize information into directors
making sense of the vast information confusion. It assists a user
searching for a particular item sift through the endless sources of
information. According to Leigh Gregg, "Today's most popular portals
started as search engines, but they've extended their offerings to
include e-mail, chat functions, instant messaging, and even
personalized service."


An ideal example of a web portal is the infamous Yahoo!. Yahoo! is a
search engine that has more than 35 million registered users and hosts
over 2,200 advertisers. Yahoo! will be discussed further later on in
the assignment.


According to MSNBC's Web site, "These companies operate from a
strategy that they will continue to capture the Internet's biggest
audience-the so-called "traffic." Nevertheless, as is explained in the
site, since the audience isn't






predictable, a web site's traffic cannot be guaranteed. The main
reason for the problem is that web surfers aren't loyal to any one
search engine. Web users utilize different search engines for
different tasks. The majority of the major web portals service the
same audience. There is no clear distinction between web portals
users, says MSNBC.[1]

However, the following definition from whatis.com helps to cast some light
on a meaning for the term:

Portal is a term, generally synonymous with gateway, for a Worldwide
Web site that is or proposes to be a major starting site for users
when they get connected to the Web or that users tend to visit as an
anchor site. There are general portals and specialized or niche
portals. Some major general portals include Yahoo, Excite, Netscape,
Lycos, CNET, Microsoft Network, and America Online's AOL.com. Examples
of niche portals include Garden.com (for gardeners), Fool.com (for
investors), and SearchNetworking.com (for network administrators).


A number of large access providers offer portals to the Web for their
own users. Most portals have adopted the Yahoo style of content
categories with a text-intensive, faster loading page that visitors
will find easy to use and to return to. Companies with portal sites
have attracted much stock market investor interest because portals are
viewed as able to command large audiences and numbers of advertising
viewers.


Typical services offered by portal sites include a directory of Web
sites, a facility to search for other sites, news, weather
information, e-mail, stock quotes, phone and map information, and
sometimes a community forum. Excite is among the first portals to
offer users the ability to create a site that is personalized for
individual interests.[2]

The above extract illustrates the term originated in commercial circles.
This is potentially problematic because it indicates that the key purpose
of a 'portal' is to offer services with a view to finding innovative
strategies to make money from users. The problem here is not the objective
of making money per se, but rather the fact that it becomes the primary
objective and services are presumably then tailored to meet the needs of
those from whom money can be made. Such a notion may well undermine over
time the educational potential of 'portals', particularly if created for
the developing world, as the paying markets for services tend to be
limited. While the implications of this are beyond the scope of this paper,
it is important to note the inherent tension, as the quest to make any
education portal financially viable runs the risk of excluding already
marginalized groups of potential users. This problem is likely to be of
particular interest to Schoolnet Africa.

In presenting descriptions of best practice in education portals, we have
chosen to take a broad approach to the concept. In effect, as the excerpts
above illustrate, a portal can in effect contain any service available via
the Internet. It is not limited to the Worldwide Web, as it can be expanded
to included e-mail services, chat rooms, and other Internet applications
not dependent on the Web. Thus, we have chosen to cluster together a
comprehensive range of potential Internet services that might be delivered
to users. We have, however, kept in mind the notion that a portal seeks to
be a 'starting point' for web users. Thus, given that this report has been
prepared for Schoolnet Africa and the Commonwealth of Learning, the
descriptions below assume an intention to target school communities and
create a portal that becomes the starting point for members of those
communities.

Reviewing Education Portals on the Internet

A key task undertaken in this research exercise has been review of a range
of existing education portals on the Internet. Detailed summaries of these
reviews are contained in Appendix A to this report, while there is also a
tool for evaluating online education software contained in Appendix C.
Before going on to describe what services seem to make most sense for an
education portal, however, it seems appropriate to begin by providing a
brief overview of key themes emerging from that review.

Our web evaluations demonstrated that there is a range of web portals
currently available. The various categories into which these portals fit
are Networking Portals, Organizational Portals, and Resourced-based
Portals.
. Organizational Portal - an 'Organizational Portal' is a portal
constructed by a specific organization whose core business is to deliver
educational material
. Networking Portals - a 'Networking Portal' is a web portal that provides
various individuals (educators, learners, managers, and administrators)
with a central point from which to access various educational tools and
facilities (online and offline).
. Resource-based Portals - a 'Resource-based Portal' is a portal, which
provides access to various educational resources online. Generally these
types of portals contain search facilities, links to other relevant
organizations or institutions, as well as possible subscription services.
Resource-based portals are, in many ways, simply a sub-set of networking
portals, but have been described differently because of their very
specific focus on resource provision. In particular, they can be
differentiated because a networking portal focuses on providing access to
resources and services accessible anywhere on the web, while resource-
based portals generally provide access to their own resources.
In many instances, these services are merged in a single portal.

General Findings


Design and Navigation

In terms of the design of the web portals evaluated, consistency throughout
sites was noted. The majority of portals set their default screen
resolution to 800 x 600 pixels, and the location, number and size of the