LITERATURE REVIEW

Katz (2002) divides portals into two groups: horizontal and vertical (VEPs) portals. VEPs (Vertical Enterprise Portals). Gartner (year) says include shopping mall portals and those on sports, etc. Horizontal Enterprise Portals or MegaPortals include: Excite, yahoo, AltaVista, etc (Gartner, 2007). Now, Intranets are also called Enterprise portals. Lakos (2004) gives the key principles that should govern a portal rollout as (1) Simplicity users want a simple and clear web environment. (2) Dependability the site and its contents should be available always and should be predictable (3) Quantifiable value users should feel self-sufficient and realize added value from using the portal (4) Personalization users should be able to change the site to their personal preferences (5) Systematic management long term success requires a systematic approach and long term commitment.

A study by JISC RSC (Regional Support Centre) London on behalf of the Excellence Gateway published in 2008 on Richmond Adult Community College: Using Technology to make a step in business efficiency and responsiveness, was to see how the college could use new technology on the business side first -the priority was to use new technologies to reduce transaction costs between the college and the public. What the study projects is to get prospectus online, web based enrolment, web registration, timetabling module, online helpdesk and e payment. The outcomes of this project includes: Reliable electronic registration linking the student database to finance systems and modules for payroll and staff development - ensures accurate payments and strong financial control; Learners enjoy the convenience of online enrolment (course permitting) with 35% of enrolments now made on the Web; The simple web-based Quality Assurance System was an early action that greatly improved timeliness and efficiency of getting learner feedback from the previous paper-based process and; Co-development of many of these modules enabled them to obtain bespoke systems more cost-effectively as the software company were able to gain commercial advantage through the developments (JISC, 2008).

Matovu (2009) in a study titled, availability, accessibility and use of ICT in management of students academic affairs in Makerere University finds that this emerged because of the problem that there was mismanagement of students’ academic records despite the technological advancement that had advanced in the University. Such problems include loss of marks, miscalculation of marks to mention but a few. The study intends to establish how ICT affected management of students academic affairs. It applied both correlation and cross sectional survey design. Data were collected using semi-structured survey questionnaires and interviews.

Correlations were used to determine the extent to which ICT was related to management of students` academic affairs and a cross sectional survey design was used because data were to be collected at one time from the sample of lecturers and administrators of Makerere University. Findings indicate that internet facilities, computers, management information systems, electronic databases all were available and accessible to administrators, lecturers and students though with restricted access for viewing results, record keeping, setting and marking exams. ICT for registration was used for tracking students registration progress by administrators and academic progressing.

Cao and Brodnick (2002) in a research titled, what social factors affect students use of online registration: an exploratory study, investigated factors that affect college students; use of online registration service that was then recently offered in a private university in Northern California. Findings show that during the first year 31% of students who pre-registered their courses and results show that academic and demographic factors affected students use of online registration service. It also shows pharmacy and international studies students and high income families had higher perception of use. However, results did not show a sign of impact of gender on the use of online registration.

Brakel (2003) in his paper on Information portals: a strategy for importing external content discusses the current lack of clarity on how to address the external information issue in conjunction with the current popularity of portals and their multiplicity, emphasizing in particular the confusion in regards to what constitutes each portal type. The issue of definition intensifies when the term information portals becomes added to the current list of portal categories. To conclude, it proposes a strategy to ensure that external information sources are perceived by an enterprise as of strategic importance.

2.1 REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

Foreign Literature

According to Robert Moskowitz of Matrix: The Magazine for Leaders in Education, when you hear the word "portal" you might immediately think of one of the many commercial Web sites, such as Yahoo or Excite, that populate the Internet today. As the term implies, these services are the gateway to the Internet for many people, offering news, search functions, sports scores, shopping and movie reviews.

A registration portal, on the other hand, is the entry point for a college or university. It provides a centralized source of information and services for students, prospective students, faculty, suppliers, administrators, alumni and friends.

The term registration portal can mean anything from a relatively simple set of Web-based application and payment services, to a comprehensive online interface offering highly personalized and customizable access to nearly all the features and benefits of campus life and work.

Registration portals can provide entry points to anything from e-shopping for books and campus regalia, to Web access, student activity information, class resources, syllabi and assignment listings, and homework submission, as well as online class registration and tuition payment.

A Relatively New Concept

Registration portals were pioneered by UCLA in 1999, to be followed by similar systems at the University of Washington and the University of Buffalo. Advancements in software simplify the work involved in building comprehensive portals from scratch. As a result, most schools can launch a pilot portal within 12 months. Expansion and roll out takes longer, however, and a continually evolving portal is an unending process.

Only about 5 percent of universities currently have campus portals, but many other are on the way. Some 80 percent of U.S. colleges with enrollments of more than 1,000 will have registration portals by 2005, predicts the Connecticut-based Gartner Group.

"They will become as essential to the campus experience as the quad," predicts Matthew Pittinsky, chairman of Blackboard Inc., the Washington, D.C.-based vendor of enterprise software for about 1,400 universities and schools.

"Portals are on everyone's mind right now, both within the university and externally," agrees Dirk Herr-Hoyman, project manager at the University of Wisconsin's Department of Information Technology, in Madison, Wisc. "In not too many years, every university will have a personalized portal system."

Targeted Services

"A portal gives the ability to serve our constituents better, giving them what they need without the things they don't need," says Dan Kelo, manager, special project development, information resources at Pepperdine. "As Web sites grow, they become difficult to navigate. Our campus portal allows us to target services to our constituents."

Herr-Hoyman agrees: "The benefits will be in keeping and attracting world-class students and faculty," he says. "That's important to us as a university. We're not cutting staff or expenses; we're trying to do more with the budgets we already have by providing better services."

While portals involve complex technologies, their cost is relatively low. Advertising-supported systems can pay for themselves. One early portal business model was to give the software free to institutions, then lace the portal's pages with advertising.

Vendors like Blackboard and PeopleSoft tend to bundle their portal systems with their existing offerings, because the portals are part of the campus-wide system the universities have already purchased from these vendors. Companies that specialize in portal design can charge as much as $250,000. But, the acquisition cost is only a fraction of the total implementation expense.

For example, the University of Wisconsin will spend millions for implementation and development during the life of its portal system. Much of that cost will go to making other applications accessible through the portal. New software is usually written with the Web in mind, but integrating a school's standalone systems (often legacies from 20 years ago) and its data can be time-consuming and expensive.

"A portal supports staff, alumni, students, faculty and others," says Blackboard's Pittinsky." It's the common interface for all the services each of these constituencies cares about on campus."

Portals lower the cost of delivering student services by leveraging the time and effort of students and faculty, who can use the portal to complete forms online for automated processing, reducing the need for administrative staff time. Another benefit is the students' ability to pay fees online. This can generate higher collections, often through debit cards that have lower transaction fees than credit cards.

What are Portals?

At the most basic level, portals gather a variety of useful information resources into a single, one-stop Web page, helping the user to avoid being overwhelmed by info glut or feeling lost on the Web. But since no two people have the same interests, portals allow users to customize their information sources by selecting and viewing only the information they find personally useful. Some portals also let you personalize your portal by including private information (such as your stock portfolio or checking-account balance).

Put simply, an institutions portal is designed to make an individuals Web experience more efficient and thereby make the institution as a whole more productive and responsive. But portals have an economic and social impact that extends far beyond any basic functional definition. Eighty nine percent of the estimated fifty eight million people using the Web in the United States use some type of portal.

It is estimated that over 20 percent of the Internets retail e-commerce is portal-based. And though portals have historically been developed from search-engine-based sites (e.g., Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, Alta Vista) or ISP-based sites (e.g., AOL, Earthlink, Prodigy), their value goes far beyond a Web page containing a directory of URLs. One author described a portal as a place to start your day and get a little news. It is an epicenter of the Web experience, a home base, a place to return to when you get lost, a place to keep your information, a place from which to communicate with others, and a trusty guide to all things Web.

Local Literature

FEU-EAC Online Student registration Portal

For the past few years, FEU-EAC has been continuously trying to find ways on how to improve its services for the students in terms of providing information, registration and other school transactions. It is eyeing the step-by-step growth and enhancement from manual, partial automation and full-automation of its systems. Considering the ideal goal of providing fast and convenient services and also the advantage of reaching out to its students from distant areas, online enrolment is definitely the most recommended innovation. Bearing in mind this ultimate goal, the College took its first step by having some of it services online.

From thereon, My FEU - East Asia College Student Portal was conceptualized.

My FEU - East Asia College Student Portal was made to assist FEU-EAC students in providing basic information related to their academic records, registration and assessments. Likewise, this will also give privilege to the students to submit their requests and transactions via Internet.

Enrolled students will be given accounts, usernames and passwords, to access and login to My FEU - East Asia College Student Portal. Students can then access this portal via Internet wherein they can now conveniently inquire information or do basic student transactions anywhere and anytime they want.

This system basically includes the following:

My Profile this is where students could view their personal and contact information. A special feature was provided for the students for possible requests to update their personal information or records.

Student Academic Information this is where students could view their academic records such as grades, class schedules and current assessments.

On-line SelfEnrolment this allows the regular students with no previous balances and accountabilities to do self-enrolment via Internet.

Other Services this is where students could access the Student Coordinating Council Voting System, upload files through My Portfolio or mark the important events or activities on their calendars through My Planner.

Certainly, FEU - East Asia College Student Portal will be enhanced and additional services will be incorporated in the future. Nevertheless, the Student Portal definitely raised the bar of the College in rendering quality services for its students.

2.2 Review on Online course registration system at Tsinghua University

Tsinghua University offers more than 3,000 curriculums per semester, and online course registration seven times. More than 500,000 students will register courses via those registration activities, which have become an important part of academic administration. All students have to register courses via the online registration system opened in 1998. To be an exception, some compulsory courses are offered to the freshman in the entrance according to their classification. The registration will be carried out by two kinds of drawing lots, real time (undergraduate students) and system automatic (graduate students).

Early 2006, we started a special project in the 2nd phase of "985" named by "the modernization of technical platform supporting education. To emphasize the student-oriented concept, improve the efficiency and quality of course registration, and fully meet registration requirements, we used a totally new registration mechanism in the implementation of this new online course registration system, which supports classification education training for undergraduate students, common course registration of both undergraduate and graduate students, and teaching activities across semesters. We reconstructed the online course registration system by introducing new registration mechanism, system architecture and design method to ensure the system more flexible and adaptable to support all kinds of students and online courses.

The system was put into use in April 2009. After two years usage, with the high attention of high level management teams, all academies and departments, proactive cooperation of all teachers and students, the system now has reached domestic advanced level through continuous improvement. It solved perfectly the problems like fake registration numbers, course chose by system is not the real one wanted, and unfair registration etc. It will introduce system design and implementation from 3 aspects:

Registration mechanism, System architecture and Design method.

i. REGISTRATION MECHANISM

The online course registration system is the central part of the educational administration system. We did research on registration mechanism before system design. Based on the analysis on some existing registration mechanism, we proposed three operative registration methods: point assignment, willingness and drawing lots. After collecting feedback and comments from all teachers and students, we decided to use the method of willingness.

Concerning the real situation and previous problems in the method of drawing lots, we optimized and adjusted the existing drawing lots method by using multi-level, multi-classification and multi-willingness. The students willingness is considered when deciding the registration priority. It means the registration willingness will influence the rate of drawing lots to solve the problem mentioned above like fake registration numbers to meet students requirement maximally.

After finalized registration mechanism, we separated the registration process into 3 phases which are same to previous ones: registration, adjustment and dropping. Detailed description could be found below:

A. In the registration phase we used the willingness method. Three willing levels are designed for compulsory courses for undergraduate students, restriction courses, optional courses and physical courses, with exceptional high priority for optional courses. For graduate students, three willing levels are also designed for degree courses, non-degree courses and physical courses with exceptional high priority for degree courses and non degree courses. For the overloaded courses, the system itself will draw lots randomly in the background according to the students current training plan and willing level.

B. In the adjustment phase the students can register via first-come-first-serve if the capacity of the courses allows.

C. In the dropping phase the students could do nothing but drop courses.

TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE

The online registration system is a periodic heavy load system especial in the registration phase: too many online users and concurrent operations, which are relatively minor in other phases. So its very important to choose appropriate system architecture.

A. User model

First of all, we analyzed the current system users. Registration activities involve all undergraduate students, graduate students, most of teachers, graduate schools, academic affairs office, and all related education administrators. Considering the large number of system users and wide coverage, the users are separated into three categories:

• Student: It refers to the undergraduate and graduate students who will inquire online courses and complete registration steps to generate personal registration table.

Teacher: It refers to the users who will deliver courses, and check the status of online course registration.

Administrator: It refers to the users who will control registration process, adjust detailed information of online courses according to the real-time registration status, and complete administration tasks in the background including drawing lots, willingness release, etc.

ii. TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE

There are tens of thousands people involved in registration activities as the major part. System administrators are relatively stable while administration operations are complicated. Based on the analysis of user category and activities, the system design is using the integration of C/S architecture based on Citrix and B/S architecture based on J2EE, which is also integrated together with authorization system and official portal of Tsinghua University.

C/S: C/S architecture is used to implement administration functionalities. Developing environment is PowerBuild 10.2. The B/S access method is implemented in C/S system by applying Citrix technology. In this way, the system implements seamless integration and roaming access between C/S and B/S, which solves the problem that its not convenient for application access and update.

B/S: B/S architecture is used to implement all kinds of functionalities for the students and teachers by using JAVA. The framework is based on Spring and Hibernate. It uses MVC structure which separates view, business and model.

Authorization: Its integrated into authorization system directly which ensures all kinds of users can access the online course registration system via portal, and doesnt require the 2nd account and password.

View: Through the two channels of teaching and teaching management, the system integrates all functionalities related to course registration via direct integration with portal. The students and teachers can take required actions via registration item listed in the channel of teaching. The administrators can run operation according to their role assignment after entering the channel of teaching management.

iii. SYSTEM DESIGN

External relationship: As the intermediate link in the teaching chain, course registration has relation to teaching planning, course arrangement, examination arrangement and scores management, which means course registration system has to cooperate with enrollment system, course system, teaching planning system, training system, examination arrangement system and scores management system. Based on the clarification of systems connections and relationship, the definition of system interface and message is described in the figure 1 below:

It can be seen that enrollment system, course system, teaching planning system, training system, are superstratum systems which provide basic data for course registration system. Examination arrangement system and scores management system are then substratum systems which will digest data provided by course registration system. The system interfaces are finalized:

For superstratum systems, course registration system read all data initiatively. It will try to get a mass of basic data only once, and then save those data as the base for course registration. Later on, it will update accordingly if theres any new information. For other kinds of data, it will read them on demand and wont save them at all.

For substratum systems, they cant access registration data directly but only wait the data pushed out by course registration system to ensure registration date revised unconsciously.

B. Function structure

The course registration flow consists of data preparation, registration, adjustment, retaking and retesting, dropping in the middle phase which actually will be carried out by students, teachers and administrators. The system functionalities are designed based on the major flow and involved system users. Details could be found in figure 2:

The implementation of willingness method is the key part including: priority determination and drawing lots calculation which can refer to my another paper: Research and implementation of volunteer course selection algorithm.

2.3 BENEFITS OF USE

The fact that use of e-registration provides information in a real-time, electronic format that allows confirmation of students` enrollment status; Students are also able to find and schedule more of the courses they need; it is used as confirmation of a student's intent to remain enrolled for the semester. E-registration is a system that could easily manage its student body while also providing added bonuses, with a main goal being to ease the transfer of information. It simplifies the registration process through a Web-enabled, user-friendly wizard and digitizes all supporting documents using intuitive processes and tools. The education system requires a tremendous amount of data and documentation, and this e-registration solution allows institutions to focus less on processing paperwork and more on what matters most meeting the educational needs of their students by having a cost-efficient, secure registration process that allows for easy access to student files. Intranets and portals are supposed to provide an infrastructure through which end-users can gain effective access to information sources needed to assist in daily tasks such as effective decision making, planning and research (Brakel, 2003).

Just like with the Internet, businesses have been at the forefront of tapping from the portal technology to rethink how traditional websites can be recognized to serve and transform their corporate goals. It is important to note that a website gives information about the organization and its significant difference to a portal is that one does not search for information as one does on the website but necessary information is provided at your fingertips on the portal already personalized information. It has become popular for academic institutions and universities in Nigeria to have their corporate presence on the Web within the last five years. The National Universities Commission, NUC and other international bodies in tertiary education have come up with the webometrics of universities across the world to highlight the growing importance of the Web to the running and administration of universities (www.nuc.edu.ng). Administrators of the universities have had to either to go about the website creation with the use of in-house developers or contract vendors. The latter are firms offering colleges and universities sophisticated websites through which students can obtain campus and other information and engage various collegial and institutional services. Indeed, at most universities abroad and at some Nigerian institutions the portal is used for specialized learning and virtual learning. E-registration was pioneered in Nigeria by the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) that discarded with the old method of manual registration for its examinations and adopted the on-line registration, which is the system currently in vogue worldwide. Consequently, it began with registration of thousands of candidates, registering for the 2006/2007 Monotechnics, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education (MPCE) examination. This was adopted and each candidate is required to either scan a printed passport photograph or download a digital copy which is to be fixed to the form. In addition, to this, a slip, containing the particulars and photograph of the candidate, will be printed out, and which will be the passport to the examination hall, adding that the examination supervisor will also have a copy of the slip for confirming the candidates identity (Vanguard Newspapers, 2006).

Many institutions in Nigeria have been somewhat quick to recognize the powerful transformational potential of portals and have developed and implemented their own.

One of such is the portal of National Open University of Nigeria. Broadly one could argue that an institution with increasing student numbers, operating in a society with an increasing desire for instant access to information, needs to carefully consider new ways in which it can interact more effectively with its students (Brown 2000 77; Twigg and Oblinge 1997). However, many institutions have just gone on board without any regard for infrastructural support, availability of internet access to students, user education, etc.

2.4 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The theoretical framework that will be used in the study is the Input-Process- Output Model. In the IPO model, a process is viewed as a series of boxes (processing elements) connected by inputs and outputs. Information or material objects flow through a series of task or activities based on a set of rules or description points. Flow charts and process diagrams are often used to represent the process. What goes in is the input; what causes the change is the process; what comes out is the output. The IPO model will provide the general structure and guide for the direction of study.

The Input-Process-Output Model also known as the IPO+S Model is a functional model and conceptual schema of a general system. An IPO chart identifies a programs inputs, its outputs, and the processing steps required to transform the inputs into the outputs.

The IPO model has many interdisciplinary applications, and is used to convey systems fundamentals in IT overview education and as a brainstorming, preliminary investigation tool in systems development processes. It consists of at least three, and sometimes four, distinct components. In contemporary Information Technology, it is almost always discussed as a three component model in which the fourth is a named optional.

The components of the IPO model are defined as:

Input - The information, ideas, and resources used

Processing - Actions taken upon/using input or stored material

Output - Results of the processing that then exit the system

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK