STUDY PORTAL: SERVICE INTEGRATION IN A MULTI-APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT

Hans-Dieter Weckmann1, Martin Fister2, Steffi Engert1

1 Centre for Information and Media Services, University of Duisburg-Essen, Schuetzenbahn 70, D-45127 Essen, Germany hd.weckmann@uni-due.de 2 Centre for Higher Education and Quality Development, University of Duisburg-Essen Introduction To meet the demands of competitiveness, attractivity to students/staff/stakeholders and service-orientation/-optimisation universities increasingly develop integrated portal solutions to present personalised single points of access to their information and information-service offerings1. This paper presents the “study portal” under development at the University of Duisburg-Essen, looking at the challenges of integrating a variegated system topography of applications for learning and teaching (see diagram below), as well as the necessary preconditions, e.g. an identity management. The portal is based on the open source portal platform “Liferay”

Figure 1: Overview of the Study Portal of the University Duisburg-Essen

1 See for example the portals programme of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/programme_portals.aspx; AG Portale für Forschung und Lehre, Deutsche Initiative für Netzwerkinformationen (DINI), http://www.dini.de/dini/arbeitsgruppe/arbeitsgruppe_details.php?ID=33; Project Fusion, University of Ottawa/Canada: http://www.uottawa.ca/erp/en/portal-faq.html; Educause Ressources on Student Information Systems http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=645&PARENT_ID=345&bhcp=1

The Study Portal an Integral Part of the E-University The Study Portal is a key element in the strategy towards the E-University Duisburg – Essen as laid down in the official mission statement of the University. It is one of the main vehicles for the sustainable integration of eLearning throughout the digital campus. For this reason, innovation projects focussed on the integration of eLearning in contents and learning processes in newly initiatied Bachelor and Master curricula are being promoted and supported simultaneously with the development and introduction of the portal. . The study portal is conceived as a central portal, merging all the information available on the campus and giving personalised or group specific access to all digital services at one single point. General Framework and Requirements The study portal at Duisburg-Essen functions simply as an integrator of existing applications. The data are delivered by external sources and presented on the portal. Only administrative information and local layouts are saved to the portal system. Therefore, a modularised portal platform with personalisation functions was chosen for implementation. The study portal has to be capable of integrating a wide diversity of systems such as Learning Management Systems, tools for communication and evaluation as well as various administrative services. This implies the necessity to combine diverse technologies such as PHP, Java, Python, .Net, etc. The communication between the study portal and the applications is realised with widely used “Simple Object Access Protocol” (SOAP). The “Single Sign-On”-Mechanism (SSO) is realised by the JA-SIG Central.Authentification Service(CAS)2. The central Identity Management of the university is provisioning the portal. The applications normally have to be run in mixed mode, because it is not feasible to do without their specific authentification mechanisms (e.g. inviting guests by e-mail). Selection of the Portal Platform uPortal had been the original choice for the portal platform on account of the example of the development at the University of Newcastle. But when the completion of version 3.0 with its full realisation of the JSR 168-standards became incalculable, a market analysis was undertaken on the following criteria:

- standardised widely used technologies! - open source - free of charge - professional support available - usability (easy to use)

Five open source products were finally investigated: "eXo platform", “Gridsphere”, “JBoss Portal”, “Apache Jetspeed” and “Liferay”. In the end, the decision was taken for Liferay. The advantages of Liferay are: + continuing development + Usability + professional support

2 See http://www.ja-sig.org/cas - originally created by Yale University.

+ wealth of functions even in the basic package + flexible concepts of roles and rights The disadvantges are: - somewhat insufficient documentation - relatively few community activities

Learning Space The central element of the study portal is the so-called learning space, which denotes the electronic representation of a seminar room. Just as all the participating people (lecturers, students) and all learning materials (e.g. folders, slides scripts etc.) are present at a certain point of time in a real seminar room, all the relevant information and objects related to a course are located in the virtual learning space, each with its unique identification. In the detailed view of the learning space, students have the possibility to view related information on exams and to apply for an exam or to withdraw an application. The lecturers design their learning spaces by allocating the tools they need.

Figure 2: Study Portal and Identity Management

Course Management: HIS3 LSF as the primary data source HIS LSF was introduced originally as a tool to generate the schedule of classes. Later it was extended to include functions like registering for courses or rooms and scheduling. In combination with the study portal, lecturers can assign different learning/teaching tools to their courses.

Figure 3: Study Portal - lecturer view Students applying for a course receive automatically access rights to the applications, assigned to the learning space. In addition, a mailing list for all the participants of the course is being created. Exam Management: HIS POS Here the information is shown concerning the exams linked to the course and as relevant for the user. The student has the ability to apply for exams or to cancel his application. Furthermore they can get an overview of their transcript of records.

3 Specialist publicly supported company HIS (Hochschulinformationssysteme) in Hannover

Figure 4: Communication and access to the interface of HIS-POS is using a standardised secure SOAP-protocol.

Security Applying to exams and withdrawing are extremely critical procedures calling for particular measures of security. The usual form of authentification on the portal with ID and password is not sufficient. Take into account, for example, how often it happens that a logoff is forgotten when using a public computer. For these reasons, a specific electronic certificate or another additional measure will be introduced.

Figure 5: Study Portal – Standard Views

Figure 6: Study Portal – Library Portlet

Figure 7: Study Portal: Online Telephone Book Deployment Scenarios In a first step, the study will be tested this summer by selected user groups from the departments for medicine, economics and pedagogy. Resources The study portal is operated by the Centre for Information and Media Services. It is running on Linux Redhat/Apache/Tomcat/Liferay in a failsafe scaleable VMWare system

environment. Its integration into the various curricula will be realised by the Centre for Higher Education and Quality Development in cooperation with the CIM.