A learning portal is the doorway to the capabilities provided by a learning management system (LMS). Specifically, it's the interface that allows learners to locate content, track their progress toward training goals, and perform a variety of other functions.
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Building a Learning Portal
by Anthony Karrer
from Learning Circuits, Tech Tools, May 2000 issue http://www.learningcircuits.org/may2000/ reprinted with permission.
So, you want to build a learning portal? Let's start by trying to define what a learning portal is. The term is a fuzzy one and has different connotations depending on whether it targets internal employees or free agent learners. This article will focus on the former; see "A Portrait of Learning Portals" in this month's feature section for a look at the public portal domain.
Essentially, a learning portal is the doorway to the capabilities provided by a learning management system (LMS). Specifically, it's the interface that allows learners to locate content, track their progress toward training goals, and perform a variety of other functions. Most are rather simple and may be little more than a menu of courses organized into a hierarchy. This relationship is shown in the figure below.
There's often a wide variety of courses and content available to the learner via a learning portal. These include everything from courseware to instructor-led classes to synchronous and asynchronous discussion boards. In many organizations, these resources are drawn from both internal and external resources. This variety is where a learning portal adds its real value.
While this variety is good for the learner, it's also bad. By putting more choices in the hands of learners, they often face a "What should I be doing now?" dilemma. A well-designed learning portal should empower, rather than confuse, employees. A well-designed learning portal will help the user make sense of the morass of content that we're throwing at them.
New era, same concept
The concept of a learning portal is by no means new. If you're familiar with learning plans from the pre-Internet era, you understand the concept. Given information about the learner, the goal is to assist him or her in making decisions about what learning is most appropriate. Of course, because the learning portal is online, it has some distinct advantages over the classic learning plan. But before we get into the advantages, let's make sure we're on the same page.
In many organizations, the race to get an LMS in place puts the learning portal on a back burner. Test your own organization: Pretend you're--let's make this simple--pretend you're you, but you're not involved with training in the organization and are fairly new. Do you know where to go on the corporate Website to get information on learning opportunities? Is it in more than one place?
We find that a common barrier to learning in most organizations is that there's no centralized place where people can find out about learning opportunities. As a training manager, you might understand the rationale behind having internal and external training on various topics spread all over your intranet, but the learner won't.
The second problem is the "build it and they will come" mentality. It doesn't work for e-commerce on the Web, and it doesn't work inside organizations. You must plan to market your services. Often, it's easiest to capture the mindshare of new employees. You might already control part of the orientation program, so you can easily piggyback a marketing message: "Here's where you go to find learning opportunities." The message is much harder to convey to the rest of the workforce, but it's that much easier when you're pointing to one location, not several.
So, how do you organize a portal? Consider the learners and how best to segment them? By job function? Role in the organization? Years in the organization? Interest areas?
Remember, the basic concept behind a learning portal is no different than a learning plan, and the same approach can be used. The simplest kind of learning portal allows the user to choose his or her job function, view a series of links appropriate to that function, and select one of the links. This is almost trivial to build. Do you have one? While many people answer yes, when you get in the learner's seat and attempt to navigate it, it's by no means easy.
Of course, I'm being a bit unfair. My simple three-level portal doesn't address the complexity of helping a user sift through the huge assortment of learning opportunities that many organizations offer. But at least it's a start. The next hurdle is that once you've created a learning portal and point learners to it, will they find content that interests them?
This last point is a major concern. Once an organization builds even a simple learning portal and begins to market it, the site won't see any return visitors if it isn't useful right away. If the learner has to answer a 20-question preassessment or can't figure out how to use the system, you'll have blown your opportunity to capture their attention.
If you're rolling out a new learning portal, it's important to provide an opportunity for feedback. The feedback we solicit from early-stage learning portals includes questions such as, "What didn't you find that you would have expected?" and "If you feel we didn't capture you as an end-user, how would you describe your job function, role, tenure, and so forth?" Of course, also feel free to ask them what they liked about the portal.
Beyond the simple portal described above, the next step is making the offerings dynamic, based on each learner's past training history and other such criteria as tenure, interests, current job function, and future career path. Each of these variables represents data that can be used to point a learner toward potential courses.
Let's assume that you're convinced that a learning portal is in your future. Where do you start? Many organizations start by trying to select an LMS. This is not a bad place to start, but be prepared for some frustration (see "The LMS Guess" in the April Learning Circuits). There are a lot of them, they're hard to tell apart, and there's a lot of marketing hype. Most concentrate on the core functions of registering, launching, and tracking learning opportunities and less on learning portal functionality. Personally, I find many of these tools tough to customize to build a learning portal--and you may have to adopt the software maker's idea of a learning portal. Make sure you keep that in mind as you review LMS systems.
The other option is to build these systems from scratch using HTML, JavaScript, a database back end, and an application server technology, such as ASP, JSP, or ColdFusion. For some organizations, this custom approach makes more sense.
Portals are likely to become the primary interface to learning opportunities as organizations adopt the software architectures to support them. Like any Website, the key is getting it right the first time.
About the Author:
Anthony Karrer is president of Technical Empowerment, an El Segundo, California-based Web training consultancy. Karrer has 15 years experience in software development, including positions as programmer, system architect, software development manager, and director. He's also an assistant professor of computer science at Loyola Marymount University, where he manages the multimedia minor program. He can be reached at 310.524.1700; akarrer@techempower.com.
Karrer, A (2000). Building a Learning Portal Learning Circuits, Tech Tools, Retrieved June 2, 2000 on the World Wide Web: http://www.learningcircuits.org/may2000/ reprinted with permission.
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Last modified Nov. 18, 2002