What will Learning Technology and Portal Work do for EOT?

The request is hard to answer precisely as the EOT work depends quite a bit on interactions with other projects and these are always uncertain. For instance, the ideas I developed with Al Gilman on customizable universal access built around a "Tango" like engine are I think quite important but that proposal was turned down!

So I will assume that the portal ideas pan out both technically and in terms of needed resources. Then rather a Pandora's box of achievements, let me discuss the consequences of a successful development by the Alliance of both computing and educational portals by July 2001. As I have already discussed with Roscoe and Scott, I don't see how this "outcome" will by that date have any particularly large number of "persons touched". The base technology is only now getting deployed commercially (e,g. the new Opera and Netscape browsers are just becoming available) and by that date you can have some 6 months experience with a "next generation" portal. We are of course continuing work testing basic ideas with older technology in classes such as those with Jackson State. Further Florida State University is deploying current generation portals (Blackboard) to thousands of students -- as "chief scientist" for the University distance and distributed learning activity, I will learn quite a bit here. So what will you be able to say about these portals. Firstly There will be a set of capabilities that are characteristic of all portals including those developed for e-commerce, enterprise information systems and community sites like Yahoo. These include:

1. Attractive convenient user interface to a broad(er) range of information and tools

2. Shorter development times for customized high quality sites (e.g. in education this means that it will be quicker to develop a new course)

3. User customization

The education portals will also exhibit some distinctive characteristics that will be hallmarks of the Alliance work

4. Methodology and tools to support the integration of simulations into curriculum. These will emerge from using a common architecture for computing and education portals and will be prototyped of course from work with the AT teams. This type of capability is not likely to be addressed by commercial education portals like Blackboard, LearningSpace or WebCT

5. Special capabilities such as collaboration, Access Grid linkage, and hand-held devices, which come from linking Alliance specific ET technologies with education portals.

6. Special capabilities coming from our relationships with organizations like the Trace Center and CILT. Here examples are aspects of universal access and Belvedere.

Those entries in items 5 and 6 that are actually available in July 2001 will of course depend on details of collaborations and other funding.

As well as the capabilities described above, one would be able to present

7. The innovative technical architecture with well defined (XML) interfaces that allow integration of learning objects from multiple systems (education) and integration of multiple programs from different domains and disciplines (computing). This would be demonstrated by learning environments that mix different authoring and/or portal approaches e.g. Blackboard, WebCT and PowerPoint

8. A vision for education in the future with important implications for educational institutions. This is illustrated by interest of HBCU's in our current work as this technology allows collaborative curriculum development and is thus helpful for institutions that lack faculty with expertise in important areas.

9. There will hopefully be a set of important computing portal outcomes that will support the education presentation.