Developing Online Learning Portals in Low Bandwidth Communities

University portals are emerging all over the world. Portals have been perceived by many people as the technologies that are designed to enhance work and learning processes at university by making workflows simpler and information more readily available in a form in which it can be processed (Franklin, 2004). There are many benefits for having a portal in a university. First, the portal makes it easy for people to find university information targeted specifically at them. Instead of the user searching the Web for information, a person identifies himself or herself to the portal, and the portal brings all relevant information to that person. Secondly, the portal uses a single consistent Web-based front end to present information from a variety of back-end data sources. Although information about people is stored in many different databases at a university, the role of a portal is to put a consistent face to this information so that visitors do not have to deal with dozens of different Web interfaces to get their information. Usability is an important issue when designing the university portal. Principles from human computer interaction must be included in the design of portals. However, there are also other issues that must be considered when designing portals with low bandwidth for universities in countries such as Africa. This concerns accessibility by students to the Web portals using limited bandwidth. Students in these countries have only limited bandwidth to access the portals. The development of portals for universities in these countries must take this factor into account. This article describes the development and use of the portal for an online learning environment (OLE) at a large distance-education institution in Africa for students with limited bandwidth. We first present a brief overview of portal, its benefits, and what it is used for in universities. The next section describes the requirements and objectives of the portals for our university. This is followed by our conceptual framework, which we have developed for the implementation of our OLE portal. The article then argues for the importance of customized development for implementing OLE portal for universities that have special needs. why PortaLS?