INTRODUCTION
The increase in the use of technology in daily life activities has led to the growth and popularity of Internet portal sites. Portals are gateways that provide information ranging from general to specific interests. There are four generally recognized classifications of Web portals: (1) horizontal, (2) vertical, (3) enterprise information portals, and (4) B2B portals (Goodman & Kleinschmidt, 2002). Horizontal portals such as Excite, Lycos, MSN, orYahoo! provide services such as news, entertainment, weather, stock information, e-mail accounts, or provide links to other searching or sponsored sites. Vertical or niche portals (or vortals) provide services to public audiences searching for specific content or interest. Enterprise information portals (also called enterprise resource portals or corporate portals) provide restricted access to private resources of an organization. B2B portals, sometimes referred to as industry portals, are a relatively new phenomenon designed to sell particular goods to consumers online; they are corporate in nature yet vertical in application. Educational Web portals would best fit into the vertical portal category and will be the focus of this article.
Educational portals are Web portals designed to give users a resource for locating and navigating to Web-based resources that support educational endeavours. These resources may include links to Web pages and files with information provided for a specific educational exercise, links to external Web sites (Web sites that are not part of the educational portal), illustrations of concepts including animations, means for accessing software, communication tools, and other electronic resources employed in teaching and learning. Considering this basic conception of educational portals, it would appear that they are all merely vertical portals designed as public gateways to educational resources. This classification is too narrow. What is important to recognize is that educational portals serve both as public gateways to information and as private gateways to the resources a particular institution or organization wants to make available only to its members. Recognizing this provides a framework for classifying educational portals into two types: educational resource portals and instructional portals. The focus will be to clarify this classification.
BACKGROUND
During the late 1990s when there was a rapid expansion of the World Wide Web in terms of both resources available and users, it became increasingly difficult for users to locate desired resources. One solution to this was the development of search engines. The other solution, often developed and provided in conjunction with search engines, was Web portals. These provided a gateway and/or filter for users to focus their efforts for finding and identifying desired Web-based resources. Yahoo and Lycos were two of the early portals and they attempted to categorize as many Web sites and resources as possible. These become the proto-type of what are now know as horizontal portals (Strauss, 2002). They provide a gateway to general resources and are the starting point for many users.
As the use of the Internet expanded, people began to find they needed resources related to a more specific topic. Developers recognized this and Web portals were designed for a specific audience in mind. These vertical portals, sometimes referred to as vortals or niche portals, contained resources for a particular audience (Goodman et al., 2002). Vertical portals target a specific interest group, for example, women (iVillage), bloggers (bloggers.com), etc. Vertical portals, like horizontal portals, are public in nature; any individual with Internet access is free to enter the portal and use its resources. Increasingly, users are turning to vertical portals as their entry point for searching and surfing the Internet.
A third major type of Web portal is the enterprise information or corporate portal. These Web portals serve as a gateway to information for a specific business or corporate entity. The enterprise information portal (EIP) provides employees access to internal applications and documents that are available on a corporate intranet (Computer World, Inc., 1999). The portal serves as a restrictive gateway to resources and information for those directly involved in the business. Access is restricted by passwords or firewalls; this makes the corporate portal a private gateway. While the portal may provide links to external sources, the selection of these is to provide the resources needed for individuals to complete assigned tasks.
A fourth major type of portal, the B2B portal, is business oriented and focuses on a business-to-business market. Marketingterms.com (2004) defines B2B as “business that sells products or provides services to other businesses.” B2B portals are vertical in nature since they provide a niche or focused area of business interest and represent an ever-growing sector of e-commerce.
At the same time that these types of portals have appeared, there has been a rise in the use of computers and the Internet by educators. An example of this is the rise of computer and Internet use by United States teachers from 2000-2004 that has risen from an average of 63 to 76.6% (Education Counts, 2006). The International Society for Technology in Education NETS for Teachers Project, a project of the U.S. Department of Education, Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology (2005) set the tone for the effective use of technology in education and reached a national consensus on what teachers should know about and be able to do with technology. Also responding to the need to improve teacher training capacities, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s “Education for All by 2015″ (UNESCO, 2006) created a portal with a variety of links to educational themes and initiatives dedicated to improving teaching and learning in countries world-wide.
The need for portals directed at educators to support their efforts is apparent. The creation and development of these portals replicated the vertical and enterprise information portals. It is then possible to classify education portals into two categories according these types of portals.
CLASSIFICATIONS OF WEB PORTALS DESIGNED FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES
The purpose of all educational portals is to provide a focused resource for educators to make the use of the Internet more effective (Stevenson, 2001). Educational portals fill a specific niche as a resource for a defined audience of educators (McLester, 1999). As a tool designed to support the educational objectives of teachers and learners, they provide access to resources for enhancing the educational opportunities of contemporary learners. Since these portals target a focused audience, they are vertical portals. However, by simply classifying all educational portals as vertical portals (vortals) one will gloss an important distinction between two predominant types of educational portals that correspond to vertical portals and enterprise information portals.
While educators and educational institutions are unique, there is broad agreement on what knowledge and skills students should acquire for students in PreK-16 settings or in specialized educational institutions. All educators striving to ensure the success of students on any level benefit from access to similar resources accessible on the Internet through public gateways. Portals of this type are similar to the typical vertical portals focused on various subjects. A descriptive way to classify these verticals portals is as educational resource portals.
In contrast to the common educational objectives, each educational institution will have unique needs and resources. The use of these resources is restricted to the individuals affiliated with the institution and is a private gateway similar to enterprise information. To distinguish these portals from the educational resource portals, an accurate designation is instructional portals. The emphasis of this type of educational portal is to provide a centralized location for the delivery of instructional materials to a targeted audience. In this case, the targeted audience is a specific learning community that the portal serves. The audience is not a general group of individuals tied by a common factor of teaching similar grade levels or learning a specific subject matter.
Vertical Portals in Education: Educational Resource Portals
Educational resource Web portals mimic the traditional format of vertical Web portals and are the more recognized type of educational portals. Others refer to these as networking or resource-based portals (Butcher, 2002). The primary purpose of this type of educational portal is to provide a publicly accessible, organized mapping of external educational Web pages and Web sites available on the Internet. In order to facilitate the search for relevant resources, the portal designer will employ a variety of categorizations. Classifications of resources may include subject matter, instructional level of students, instructional objectives, types of instructional activities, elements of the teaching or learning process, or theoretical views of education. Using this approach, the educator is able to complete a focused search for the specific resource(s) needed.
While the primary type of resources provided in this type of educational portal are external Web pages and Web sites, one may find additional internal resources (Web pages that are part of the portal and not separate or external to it) created by the portal designer. The designer may include articles or tools unique to that portal. For example, the Web portal may include submissions through a community discussion board or tools for creating teaching resources (e.g., worksheets or rubric generators). These additional resources are categorized with the external resources but one does not leave the portal to access them.
Examples of educational resource portals include:
• EDSITEment.neh.com (2006) focusing on the humanities,
• goENC.com (2006) focusing on mathematics and science content, PrimarySchool.com.au (2006) that offers free primary school lesson plans and resources, and
• Microsoft Education (2006) and Teachnology.com’s Web Portal for Educators (2006) that offer a comprehensive list of teacher resources and other educational resource sites
The latest trend in educational portals is to provide standards-based educational resources focusing on the curriculum (Chamberlain, 2005). With the increased emphasis on standards-based curriculum, educational portals such as Marco Polo (2006) are providing resources linked to national and regional educational standards. While the format for organizing the resources available via the portal is changing, these portals remain focused on providing a publicly accessible gateway to the resources educators from various institutions will find useful.
The drive toward technology literacy in education has encouraged educators to design their own Web sites that serve as portals for their students to access information relevant to coursework. Individually designed educator Web sites provide authentic information that assists students in gaining access to instructional materials that are targeted and useful to achieving specific learning outcomes. Templates are available for educators to design Web sites that serve as portals for their students. One example is Tom March’s “QassActPortal” (2005), which allows educators to build a directory of classroom learning sites that can be shared by anyone who chooses to become a member of this Web-based community. Other examples of educational sites provide resources for teachers to create individualized Web pages. These examples include Teachnology.com’s “Web Site Maker” (2006) and Homestead.com’s “Web design software” (2006).
One important limitation with the educational resource Web portal is that the resources available are limited to those the designer has included. While there is often a search function for the portal, one is typically searching within the resources included in the portal. Working within the portal environment, one may miss additional resources on other Internet sites. Educational resource Web portals often overcome this limitation by including links to the primary search engines. This points to the need to assess any portal one may use to ensure that the information is current, accurate, and non-biased. Additionally, the information and resources provided ought to be relevant to the needs of the audience of the portal and regularly updated (Burke, 2001).
Enterprise Resource Portals in Education: Instructional Portals
Educational portals that provide resources for the educational or instructional activities of a specific group of individuals are similar to the enterprise resource portals found in the corporate world. These instructional portals provide a centralized location for the delivery of instructional materials to a private audience. In this case, the targeted audience is a specific learning community that the portal serves; in most cases, this is an educational institution but it is not limited to them. Instructional portals are gateways that restrict the access of educational resources to a specific set of individuals by requiring a password or using a firewall.
Since each educational community has unique needs and resources, the instructional portal will include many resources of value to the members of that community. For example, post-secondary education institutions may create an instructional portal to provide a centralized location for students and instructors to access online teaching tools, course registration systems, methods for updating and accessing student records, and other files with information for the members of that community. Some educational institutions provide access to commercial software via a network or Internet connection. In these cases, the use of a password restricts access to the instructional portal. Similarly, instructional Web portals may also be part of an institution’s intranet. Often, the instructional Web portal will include links to external Web sites that provide information of interest to members of the learning community, but this is not the primary function of the portal. In many cases, the portal will link to other sub-portals created by different individuals within the educational community tailored to the specific needs of a subgroup.
One example of an instructional portal used by an institution of higher education is the My.UNC (my.unc.edu) portal at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (Casile, 2004). As educational institutions further their transitions to providing additional technological and networked resources, they are finding it beneficial to provide a centralized yet personalized starting point to locate these resources. The instructional portal provides ready access to the primary resources offered through the institution’s computer network. This provides a common starting point for the community members to access the institutional resources that are available.
Many institutions of higher learning are creating instructional portals, but corporations are as well. Cisco’s “Networking Academy” (2006) provides instruction related to certification in the information technology fields. These companies use instructional portals to restrict access to materials to those individuals who are attempting to gain professional certification. Both instructional materials and assessment tools are available online but only to individuals with passwords to gain access.
As an institutional resource, an instructional Web portal provides an effective means for the members of educational community to access networked resources. However, because the focus is on providing a gateway to resources, instructional portals have limited links to external sources of information. Therefore, they are quite limited in providing assistance in providing resources that support teaching and learning. Instructional Web portals though may include links to educational resource portals.
FUTURE TRENDS
As the future challenges educational practice to respond to a digital generation of learners, the design of Web portals will become more complex and sophisticated. Possibilities are endless as state-of-the art technology develops and offers the capability to access information in rich formats other than text. The key to the success of educational Web portals rests with the technology proficiency and access educators and the quality and the presentation of resources that educators find useful in their daily practice. This becomes especially important given the context of a world driven by technology.
It is clear that the educational resources portals will evolve to reflect the changing demands placed on educators. This is already occurring as portals such as Marco Polo mentioned earlier continue to incorporate the newest trends emphasizing standards-based education. Educational portals will develop to meet the needs of teachers by providing vertical portals with resources teachers from a variety of institutions will need to achieve successful educational outcomes. Undoubtedly, there will be continued enhancements to the means users have for accessing the resources available through educational resource portals. The GEM or Gateway to Educational Materials (www.geminfo.org) is one example of this. This service provides GEM Consortium members access to metadata variables they can use to enhance the search of materials available through a portal (Van Horn, 2003). Enhancements of this type will continue to improve a user’s ability to locate relevant sources of information.
What is more difficult to predict is the direction of portals such as instructional portals. Much as the classification of educational portals reflects the trend of an informational technologist to make effective use of the Internet through the development of enterprise information portals, educational portals will continue to incorporate the advances in portal technology developed in the corporate world. Educational portals will therefore continue to reflect the developments found in other areas.
CONCLUSION
The classification of any variety of objects can be difficult. This is especially true with educational portals given expanding use of portals to help different audience effectively use the Internet and online resources. However, there are two primary aims of educational portals: (1) to provide an organization with available information or links to outside information or (2) to restrict access to resources or information within the confines of a given Web site. This article has provided a scheme for classifying Web portals along the lines similar to the classification of any Web portal.
In conclusion, educational resource portals are vertical portals that provide a public gateway for finding Internet Web sites and resources. Instructional portals are versions of enterprise information portals that provide an entry point to private resources and information of an educational institution or organization. Applying this classification allows a person to understand the aim of an educational portal. Furthermore, in noting that educational portals reflect the development of other portals it is possible to determine the direction of educational portals in the future.
KEY TERMS
B2B Portal: Business to business portals with a vertical format designed for e-commerce.
Corporate Portal: See enterprise information portal.
Educational Portal: Gateway designed for education.
Educational Resource Portal: A public gateway that organizes educational resources available on the Internet.
Enterprise Information Portal: A gateway portal to an institution’s intranet.
Extranet: A private network that allows an institution or organization to share limited access to information with and of interest to outside parties.
Horizontal Web Portal: A portal that aims to provide a gateway to as broad of a range of Internet Web sites as possible; examples include Yahoo!, AOL, Lycos.
Instructional Portal: An education portal similar to a enterprise information portal; the purpose is to provide a restricted gateway to resources and information an institution or organization wants to keep private.
Intranet: A private network of an institution or organization composed of local area networks.
Internet: The connection of computers via an internetworking of computer networks around the world.
Niche Portal: An alternative name for vertical portals.
Vertical Portal or Vortal: A Web portal designed for a specific audience.
