Title of Report

The VUMA! Portal – An Exercise in Creating Online Communities for South African Higher Education

NDL Butcher

Director

Neil Butcher & Associates

Johannesburg

South Africa

Abstract

The paper notes that it is critical to begin with careful analysis of how the target users are and what the ‘value proposition’ of a Portal such as this will be that encourages them to visit the site and become regular users/contributors. When implementing this value proposition, there is a plethora of readily accessible research on web and Portal design that can be used to fast-track the process of defining appropriate principles to underpin the design of a Portal such as VUMA! however, the advantages of using FOSS web platforms lies predominantly in their openness and not their cheapness.

VUMA! reflects an attempt to harness the potential of Web 2.0 technologies to create inter-institutional communities of practice in South African higher education. Although we are confident that the principles underpinning the design of this Portal are robust, it is not yet possible to tell whether this venture will succeed. However, review of the OER movement and other related Web 2.0 developments indicates a need to take account of several key lessons if one is to avoid the hype and create something of meaningful educational value.

Keywords: web 2.0; portal design; open educational resources; communities of practice; free and open source software.

1 Introduction

FOTIM (the Foundation of Tertiary Institutions of the Northern Metropolis) has received funding to develop a portal to serve the collaborative needs of its member institutions, thus enabling them to enhance the learning experience of students while creating a platform for collaboration on academic and support levels. The Portal has been called VUMA! The development of this portal – underway in 2007 – offers a unique opportunity to develop a theoretical framework for the development of online communities whose organic growth is based on underpinning Web 2.0 platforms[1]. This paper represents a first attempt to gather together the results of the work completed to date. While it is too early yet to assess whether or not the objectives of the Portal, this paper presents lessons learned in the early phases of the project. Further papers will continue to highlight new lessons as these emerge.

The VUMA! Portal is being designed throughout in ways that seek to develop communities of users who contribute content and help to shape the direction and substance of the portal. It will aim to increase the possibilities for individual contribution, and thus involvement and a feeling of ownership, and of communication, allowing collaborative construction of knowledge. It will also be a source of support to develop individual intellectual abilities on all levels of the learning experience of the users. The VUMA! Portal seeks to treat users as creators, as engaged participants in communities of practice. The portal is being created by ‘stitching’ together a series of ‘best-of-breed’ Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) applications.

The opportunity is unique because its location within FOTIM creates potential for mobilizing large-scale, but highly focused communities of users, mobilized around common collaborative interests. In particular, the portal will enable university students to collaborate and share experiences on the challenges of coping with university life, while integrating this collaborative, interactive space with a solid base of high quality materials on related topics sourced from both the FOTIM institutions and around the world. It is hoped that our ‘semi-structured’ deployment of FOSS will facilitate easy growth and re-shaping of the portal experience by this community.

In addition, the portal will also seek to create a similar collaborative space for academics, in this instance focusing on stimulating collaborative efforts in curriculum design and materials development. This comprehensive facility will be developed in partnership with the national Department of Education’s portal, www.thutong.org.za and a host of other projects, including the International Association for Digital Publications (IADP) and the African Virtual University’s Open Education Resource (OER) Portal. It will aim to create a common, integrated space in which the community of FOTIM academics can develop and share educational resources. This will be achieved by building a platform that will integrate project management and resource management functionality. This tool will enable project managers and course developers to manage online content development projects through decentralized project teams via the Internet in a way that will ensure that all information, documentation, and resources generated during development processes are automatically stored in an accessible online resource repository for future use and repurposing.

In this way, the portal will test a collaborative approach whereby public higher education institutions are able to work together in areas of common interest while retaining the competitive relationships. This paper seeks to reflect on progress with implementation of the portal, and represents a first effort to share the results of our work with a broader, more academic community.

2 Starting with the Users

The VUMA! Portal development process began with identification of key target audiences, which was done in consultation with FOTIM members. The VUMA! Portal will focus on presenting a primary/core purpose for each of its core User Groups. All of the services offered by the Portal cluster around these core purposes, which were identified as follows:

Table 1 VUMA! Portal User Groups

User Group / Core Purpose /
Students / A one-stop point of access and support for learners to enable them to make the most of their university careers and to access what they need to succeed academically and in other elements of their time in higher education.
Prospective Students / A mechanism for supporting prospective students to make the right choices as they consider their options in higher education and future careers (to be implemented in partnership with Higher Education South Africa’s National Information Service for Higher Education).
Parents and Teachers / A source of advice and support on the challenges and pressures facing university students, and the roles that parents and teachers can play in supporting their children or learners.
University Staff / The premiere location for online collaboration amongst university staff in their professional pursuits, supporting and encouraging both formal and informal collaboration.

Phase one of development has focused on students, and phase two will focus on university staff. Workshops have already been held with target student users in order to understand whether or not the chosen focus is appropriate, as well as what additional services students would like to see on the Portal. The results of these discussions have been integrated into implementation plans for the Portal.

3 Design Choices

The starting point for construction of the VUMA! Portal was to undertake extensive research into portal design, with a view to ensuring that the Portal builds on the enormous experience gained in recent years in website and design. This research led us to extrapolate the following critical design principles:

3.1 Design Simplicity

Research evidence on usability of portals reveals clearly that users do not appreciate portal designs that are cluttered and make it difficult to locate the key services they require with a minimum of effort. Thus, the design of the VUMA! Portal has attempted to be focused, clean, and simple. We have tried to achieve this by:

• Guiding the user’s eye through the use of few, well-chosen visual elements;

• Minimizing the use of text, particularly on landing pages and user-specific home pages;

• Eliminating all visual design elements, unless they can be demonstrated to serve a clear and important functional purpose;

• Defining a clear primary goal and purpose for each target group of users;

• Using a primary 2-column design for presentation of information, expanded – if absolutely necessary – to a maximum of 3 columns on identified pages;

• Positioning the site centrally within the browser, and leaving surrounding space empty and white;

• Making global navigation devices large, bold, clean, and obvious, setting them apart from content, differentiating them using colour and shape, and using clear text to make the purpose of each navigation item and link unambiguous;

• Ensuring that all hyperlinks within text are clearly differentiated from normal text;

• Avoiding wasted space, particularly unnecessary spacing between elements and overly large headers/footers;

• Facilitate navigation around the Portal by using a ‘breadcrumb’ navigation bar on all pages that allows users to locate exactly where they are and the path that has been followed to get there.

With this in mind, the VUMA! Logo was also re-designed to ensure that it would integrate successfully into the portal design and serve the primary purposes of the site (particularly attracting students), that it is distinctive and instantly recognizable, and that it reflects the personality and qualities of the portal. The resulting home page design based on this brief is presented below:

3.2 Database-Driven Portal, Adhering to Open Standards

The VUMA! Portal is being developed as a database-driven website, in order to facilitate quick and easy development and deployment of new content. During technical design, the following open standards have been identified to underpin the construction and/or use of any database systems. These include:

a) The Dublin Core metadata standard for resources and publications;

b) The IEEE Learning Object Model for learning object metadata;

c) XML (Extensible Markup Language) to be used for data export purposes;

d) RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to be used to allow people to have portal data ‘fed’ to their web browsers;

e) Where required, RDF (Resource Description Framework) schemas to be used for specialized ontologies, as published on http://www.schemaweb.info/.

The overall portal is designed to adhere to World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards, in order to ensure that the completed system can be displayed on both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox web browsers. To accommodate a broad spectrum of users, the design of the Portal has allowed for users with a maximum screen resolution of 800 x 600.

3.3 Web 2.0 design

In keeping with web design principles articulated in recent writing about Web 2.0 platforms, the VUMA! Portal has been designed throughout in ways that seek to develop communities of users who contribute content and help to shape the direction and substance of the portal. It aims to increase the possibilities for individual contribution, and thus involvement and a feeling of ownership, and of communication, thus allowing collaborative construction of knowledge. The VUMA! Portal seeks to treat users as creators, as engaged participants in communities of practice. This is reflected in the initial technology choices that we have made.

4 Technology Choices

As has been noted, the VUMA! Portal is being developed by ‘stitching’ together existing Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) platforms. There were two reasons for this. First, it was hoped that used of FOSS platforms would reduce the cost of technological development on the Portal, a potential benefit often cited by the FOSS Community as a key reason for using FOSS. Second and more important, though, was that it was expected that use of FOSS platforms would lead to a more open and flexible architecture, which would lend itself better to adaptation and extension by the emerging communities of practice on VUMA!

After a review of different portal/content management systems, an initial choice was made to use a Java-based application called Liferay. Amongst other features, this software was particularly chosen for its adherence to a Java Specification Request standard called JSR 168 – Portlet Specification. LifeRay comes with a range of JSR-168 compliant portlets ‘out-the-box’. However, the main advantage is its ability to ‘hot-deploy’ any other JSR 168 compliant portlets, that is JSR-168 compliant portlets that may have been developed and deployed on other open source/commercial JSR-168 compliant Portal Servers. Theoretically, this dramatically increases the number of potential portlets that can be reused or deployed on LifeRay.

Use of Liferay enabled the development team to have a functional Portal ready for review within six weeks of commencement of the project. However, it quickly became clear that this choice would prove problematic, given the wide range of other FOSS platforms that are not JS-168 compliant, and that are built on PHP platforms. As a result, a decision was taken to migrate the Portal onto Drupal, a PHP-based content management system with a large community of users. Currently, we are systematically integrating into Drupal the following additional applications:

• A wiki facility, to enable organic growth of content in the Portal. A wiki is a web environment that allows visitors to add, remove, edit, and change content, typically without the need for registration. It also allows for linking among any number of pages. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. It is proposed to use the open source product MediaWiki, which is the wiki software currently running Wikipedia, amongst other sites. This is the clear product leader in its class, and thus is an obvious choice for such functionality. MediaWiki has the best layout and editing tools available in a Wiki format. It also seems to be easily integrated with other PHP based systems. An RSS exporter to MediaWiki will also be integrated. This will allow users to track changes to the Wiki quickly and easily. Deployment of MediaWiki is also being extended to include support for the development of the VUMA! resource management system. In our search for applications that would support resource management on VUMA!, no existing software could be found that served the specific purposes of the Portal. Thus, the system will need to be customized within MediaWiki to provide what is needed. This system will not only support the student community, but the academic community as well in the long term. Importantly, as this resource management system will be integrated into MediaWiki, it will be extended as a user-driven facility. We hope to be able to release this module into the MediaWiki community for general development and extension when it is ready.