Join our mailing list!
©2007
StudentAffairs.com
All Rights Reserved
|
A River Runs Through It:
Considerations and Issues when Evaluating Student
Portals
Kyle
Johnson
Manager, Information Systems
Duke University Student
Affairs
Posted February 23,
2001 Student
Affairs Online, 2 (Winter)
In October 2000, Stuart Brown and I talked at the NASPA
Technology Institute about our shared desire for student affairs
professionals to gain a better understanding of technology issues. It
was from those discussions that this column evolved. The name of this
column, A River Runs Through It, is borrowed from the Norman
Maclean book of the same name. I must admit that I have not read the
book (or seen the 1992 Robert Redford film adaptation), but the title
has always intrigued me. If a river runs through something, is it
really one thing, or two things separated by a river? It is in that
spirit that I would like to spend this time discussing student
affairs and technology. Are these two things separated by a river, or
one thing with a river running through it?
I tend to look at issues facing student affairs from more of a
technology perspective, and I'd like to share that perspective with
you all. I promise not to overwhelm anyone with technical jargon. I
think you'll see as things progress that the gulf between technology
and student affairs isn't as wide as you may think. In fact, the more
I learn, the more I see that as student affairs professionals we have
some great theories and at experience at our disposal, we just need
to understand how to apply all of that to our technology
needs. This time around I'd like to spend some time talking about web
portals.
By now, most of us probably have a pretty good idea what a web
site is, but portals are a fairly new concept for student affairs. At
its most basic, a portal is just a single place that a person (in our
case students) can go to be presented with a wide variety of
information specifically pertinent to them. In many ways, a web page
with a list of links is a very primitive portal, but it's not much of
one. A good portal builds on that by allowing the user to customize
various parts of the site, from the "look and feel" of the site to
the actual information displayed. Commercial sites like myYahoo
are a good example of this kind of portal. Some higher education
institutions are getting into the game too, primarily with library
portals (like North Carolina State University's MyLibrary)
or services portals (like Virginia Tech's Hokie
Pipeline). The truly excellent ones will even learn about the
user and begin presenting information that is similar to things
they've looked at in the past (this is called suggestive selling in
retailing).
So how do you make sure your portal is truly excellent? Portal
design (and, in fact, web design in general) is best evaluated on
four criteria: quality of content, quality of interface (ease of
use), quality of infrastructure (speed of response), and degree of
coupling (how the various pieces of the system interact). Write these
down, tattoo them to your forehead, or engrave them on your desk -
they are the four most important concepts of portal design. Most of
the decisions you make during the design process will revolve around
what trade-offs you are willing to make between these four concepts
to achieve your desired goal.
Quality of Content
It was not an accident that I listed content as the first area at
which to look. With the proliferation of electronic media competing
for students' time, just because you build it doesn't mean they will
come, or more specifically come back. If the information or
services students want or need aren't where they are, they'll go
somewhere else, and if there isn't new or updated content or services
on a pretty regular basis, they'll stop coming to the portal. There
aren't any real rules for how often, but my general goal is for a
student to visit the portal at least once a week. Exactly what kind
of information and services should be available at your is going to
be up to you.
While we're talking about the quality of content, it's probably
worth noting quality's lesser known sibling: management, as in
management of content. An in depth discussion of strategies for
effectively managing the content of the portal is a bit beyond the
scope of this installment, but here are some thoughts. Content should
be managed by (pause for dramatic effect) content experts.
That's right. The people who know the most about a given topic should
manage the content for that topic. Of course that means your portal
system has to make it easy to manage content because your content
experts shouldn't have to be technology experts. In addition, a good
portal system will allow for distributed content management,
as your content experts probably aren't all concentrated in once
place.
Quality of Interface
If you have great content, but no one can figure out how to find
it, your portal won't fare much better than if you had no content at
all. That's where our second concept, quality of interface, comes
into play. How the content of the site is organized and displayed
will greatly affect the user experience. This isn't about how
"pretty" or "slick" the portal looks, it's about how the design
allows students to (or impedes them from) interacting with the
portal. Dr. Richard Keeling of ReThinkInc
has described today's students as "nonhierarchical, nonlinear,
non-departmental" thinkers. But most of us (and our organizations)
are hierarchical, linear, and departmental. The interface of the
portal then becomes the bridge between their way of thinking and
ours. In the same way that we have content experts to manage the
content of the site, so too should we have interface experts
to manage the interface of the site. There are people who get degrees
in human interface design, so don't under estimate the importance of
good interface experts, or the impact of bad ones. Just look at your
computer for an example. For you Windows users, what brilliant mind
thought putting shutdown under the Start menu was a good idea? For
the Mac folks, dragging a disk to the trash can to eject it is
certainly not the first, most obvious choice.
Quality of Infrastructure
So now we have great content and an excellent interface. But if
the portal is slow to respond to requests or frequently unavailable,
students will get frustrated and quit coming. That's where quality of
infrastructure becomes important. When you're designing a portal
system, there are a number of infrastructure issues to be
considered.
- Bandwidth and throughput describe how much data the
system can send and receive within a given time period and are
often measured in megabytes per second (or if you're really lucky
gigabytes per second). The design of your network, placement of
servers, and type of hardware will all affect bandwidth and
throughput. The good news is that you can almost always get the
bandwidth and throughput you want, as long as you're willing to
spend the money. The relationship between throughput and cost is
roughly linear - the more you have the more it costs.
- Stability refers to how often the system is down,
either unexpectedly or planned. The telecommunication industry
rates stability by a scale of nines. Two nines represent 99%
uptime (i.e. in a year the system will be down less than a total
of four days), three nines represent 99.9% uptime (i.e.
yearly downtime of less than eight hours), and four nines
represent 99.99% uptime (i.e. downtime of only 52 minutes
in a year). I doubt anyone in student affairs needs a four nine
system, but a two nine system is worth shooting for.
- Scalability characterizes the ability of a system to
grow to meet demand. We generally talk about it in terms of the
number of simultaneous users that can be handled. A scalable
system will allow you to build an installation that can handle 10
users but easily expand to handle 10,000 without having to
redesign the whole system. The relationship between scalability
and cost tends to be "stepped linear." As an example, the cost for
up to 1000 users may be $10,000, while the cost for 1001 through
2000 users will jump to $20,000.
- Location of infrastructure describes where the system
is physically, as well as logically, located. Many portal vendors
offer to "host" the portal system for you at their location. While
this can be a great solution for schools with limited
infrastructure resources and expertise, there are some very real
issues that need to be addressed if you choose to have parts of
your infrastructure located off campus. As with content
management, a full discussion of these issues will have to wait
for another time. For now just realize that they exist.
Degree of Coupling
In physics and engineering, coupling defines the degree to which
the function of one part of a system affects the other parts.
Tightly coupled systems are ones in which a change of one part
of the system will require changes to many of the other parts of the
system to maintain functionality. Loosely coupled systems
allow for parts of the system to be changed or replaced without
necessitating wholesale changes to the entire system. For a portal,
understanding the relationship between the content, interface, and
infrastructure will tell you a great deal about the degree of
coupling in your system. Tightly coupled systems are bad. You
don't want a system where a change in the interface requires major
changes to the infrastructure (or vice versa), or, worse yet, major
revisions to the content. Tightly coupled systems also tend to
require a single individual who is an expert in all three of the
areas we've been discussing, and that's probably not realistic or
desirable. What you really want is a loosely coupled system where
experts from the three areas can work somewhat independently on their
particular issues (in the computer industry this is often called
separating the business logic from the display logic).
Obviously no system can be completely decoupled, or it wouldn't
function. The goal here is to have a system that is coupled in well
defined and reasonable ways and that allows everyone to do the work
for which they are best suited.
At this point I suspect you have almost as many questions as you
did at the start of this, but hopefully they're at least
different ones. I'd like this column to reflect your concerns
and issues, so let me know what you're thinking, what you're
wondering, and we can talk about it here together. As we all stand
witnessing this river, most of you are probably looking from the
student affairs side of the river across at the technology side. Go
ahead and wave, because I'm on the technology shore looking over at
you all. If you're willing to wade in and get wet, so am I. Maybe the
answers to all our questions are in the middle of this river - if
we're just willing to look for them.
Submit a
Letter to the Editor |
Printer
Friendly Version
|
