An Educational Portal: Bridging the Gap among Students, Educators, Parents and Administration

by Constantine Stephanidis, George Margetis, Alexandros Mourouzis and Anthony Savidis

An Educational Portal has been developed to address the needs of the educational community in the region of Crete and to foster the adoption of Information Society Technologies within the Hellenic Educational System. It provides various online community facilities and access to educational resources for supporting collaboration, assistive learning and teaching practices.

The Regional Operational Program of Crete 2000-2006 involves various activities aiming at introducing Information Society Technologies to the educational community in the region of Crete. In this context, the Educational Portal has been designed and developed by FORTH-ICS in collaboration with the Regional Administration of Primary and Secondary Education in Crete, with the main objective to promote the penetration of the Information Society ideals in the Hellenic Educational System, reflecting at the same time the cultural identity of Crete.

This effort addresses a crucial educational challenge, which is to maximize access to the information resources required to improve existing teaching, learning and research practices in education, and aims to establish a technologically aware society. In particular, the Educational Portal of Crete is aimed to:

• bridge the gap among students, educators, parents and administration, in order to increase interactivity and communication and to facilitate collaborative work and research
• enhance students’ awareness and exploration of educational resources available in the Web, and thereby create opportunities for the students to increase their learning potential
• increase the use of the Web by students and teachers and thereby foster further adoption of Information Society ideals within the educational community.

Towards achieving the above objectives, the Educational Portal provides to its users the following tools and services:

• Digital Library
  Through the Digital Library of the portal, users may gain access to various educational resources as well as to information on the legal framework underlying primary and secondary education in Greece. The provided educational resources include, but are not limited to, articles and publications, tests and exams, teaching instructions and guidelines, and in general useful and practical educational material.
• Special Interest Forums
  A number of online communities of special interest can be established through the portal’s forum facilities as a means for collaboration and communication among the portal users. Users can propose discussion topics and participate in evolving discussions. Furthermore, the portal provides the ability to certain groups of users to participate in private exchanges of ideas, opinions and experiences.
• Announcements board
  This facility allows wide dissemination of latest news and information on educational topics, as well as access to the archives of all past announcements.
• Advanced search facilities
  Users can use various search facilities (eg keyword-based, parameter-based) to retrieve information regarding all the available portal content (digital library resources, posted messages, announcements, etc).
• Administration tools
  The portal features an integrated content management system for organizing and facilitating the collaborative creation and update of dynamic content. Furthermore, it provides the administration of each school in the region with support facilities for the accomplishment of administration tasks, such as (semi-) automated generation of statistical reports.

In summary, the main beneficiaries of the services provided by the Educational Portal of Crete are:

• Students and Teachers - Learning and teaching are highly assisted through the available educational content, while collaboration is enhanced through the communication portal facilities.
• Parents - The Educational Portal provides to parents access to information related to educational activities, school contact information, courses curricula and schedules, etc. Furthermore, they have the ability to communicate with other stakeholders within the local educational community.
• Administrations of Schools and Educational Services - The portal provides facilities for the management and structured presentation of information regarding all schools and educational services of primary and secondary education in Crete.

The Educational Portal’s home page.

The portal development followed an iterative user-centred approach, taking into account the needs of all stakeholders within the educational community in Crete. During the development procedure, the portal was evaluated by usability experts, as well as by representative users. At the time of preparation of this article, a prototype of the portal has been made available online in order to be thoroughly evaluated by the local educational community. The Educational Portal will be soon launched for public use and made available at http://creteportal.sch.gr.

Please contact:
Constantine Stephanidis, ICS-FORTH, Greece
E-mail: csics.forth.gr