By Christina Smith
In order to give students “whatever they want, whenever they want it” online, the University launched a re-designed My.Hofstra.edu portal this weekend, according to Laurie Harvey, the director for Student Computing Services and Help Desk.
Harvey said that when the portal was first designed in September 2004, portals and the whole concept behind them were new. The original goal of the University’s portal was to give students a one-stop log-in with everything they need at their fingertips. However, she added that “we all know how much technology can change in five years.”
“The original structure no longer supports what it was made to do,” Harvey said. “It had instead begun to limit students to what they could do.”
And so, the new University portal was born. With a more user-oriented interface, the new portal design allows users to harness features more easily and learn new Web techniques, all of which will be more “role-based,” according to Harvey.
“Students will see what students need, employees what employees need, and faculty what faculty needs,” Harvey said. “The entire this is more customizable.”
Brian Ferris, a Web development project leader at the University, agreed that the goal was to improve the portal based on what students actually want and need to see.
“I hope it’d easier for them to find more information,” Ferris said. He added that the Web development team decided not to change the things students use more often, like Blackboard and G-mail. “We really wanted to change the arrangement of the other things. If they couldn’t find it before, it doesn’t matter that it’s easier to find now.”
However, if the user-uproar over this Fall’s new Facebook design is any indication of how college-aged students respond to a change in their everyday technologies, Student Computer Services and the Web Development department may be unsuccessful in their efforts. When asked about the comparison between student reactions to Facebook’s design upgrade and how students may react to the new portal, Harvey was optimistic that the circumstances here are different.
“I remember when we had a different mail system, and we changed in one day over a break one year,” Harvey said. “Students were so welcoming to that change because we switched to G-mail, something familiar to them.” She added that the response to the portal will be similar, not because of familiarity but because the old design was simply unproductive and difficult.
The features of the new portal include a left-hand navigation bar, a Google-enabled campus map, a classified section for student related content and the ability to move around the sight in “one to two clicks, rather than four, five or six,” according to Harvey.
Rebecca Gore, a freshman at the University, thought the upgrade showed a definite leap through the technology age. “The look of it is a lot less Windows ’95 and a lot more Windows Vista,” she said.