Many universities and colleges have poured a lot of money into very expensive but not always very efficient web portals.
Portals were supposed to be the technical solution to all communication problems on campus by becoming the start page of students’ internet browsers. Problem is most of them are still underused due to their poor design and userunfriendliness.
I’ve recently come across an innovative take on this classic problem: Bowdoin College’s Student Gateway.
As Robert Denton, a Senior Media and Design Consultant at Bowdoin College, explains on his personal blog, the idea was launched in late spring by the student it-cio advisory council and then quickly implemented by a talented senior, Mark Hendrickson ‘07.
The design and features of this start page/portal are reminiscent of Netvibes, the start page I use (I know that The College of New Jersey has been working on a similar project for a while now as well).
This got me thinking.
If these AJAX-based start pages and their associated widgets become all the rage as the A-list blogger Steve Rubel wrote a few weeks ago, institutions should start to think about offering their own widgets for these popular solutions (besides Netvibes, Google Start Page comes to mind as well) or offer an API of their own start page application so any talented student or web service provider can build a widget to integrate the outside services students want on THEIR start page.
Does your institution have already something similar in place? Share the link with us by posting a comment!
I think a better solution is Pageflakes as they have specifically created Page templates for Students and Teachers.
Thanks for the link, Amit.
Besides the Grade Tracker, I didn’t see anything different that what’s available on Netvibes though. I’m not sure it’s that difficult to pick and place widgets on a page… But, that’s definitely an application to keep in mind.
Karine –
Great catch! I’m a big fan of Netvibes and have been thinking that this model is really ideal. The more colleges can let go of the “container” (website, portal, whatever) and focus on content delivery, I think we’d see some great things happening. Bowdoin shows that they get it with this app.
Cheers,
Charlie