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The University of Maine System is looking to implement a software portal for its seven campuses that would create a single digital home for course information and student services. Currently, the questions of whether that portal will be paid for through student fees and benefit all campuses equally are unclear.
The board of trustees estimated during its Nov. 16 meeting the portal would cost $20 per student per semester. This estimate gave the impression any sort of portal would require fees, but according to Rosa Redonnett, executive director of Student Affairs at the system office, the estimate was put forth by a company to the group working toward a final proposal for the portal and is not the only option available to the university system. The chief information officer at the system office, Ralph Caruso, and the Information Technologies officers at each campus are reviewing four options for designing the portal, and the vendor’s was the only one that included a fee estimate. Redonnett declined to name the vendor because of confidentiality reasons.
“It’s only one thing that this particular vendor mentioned,” Redonnett said. “It’s not necessarily something that we would be pursuing.”
John Gregory, IT director at the University of Maine, said that based on information he has received from the system office, he understood there would be no student fees to pay for the portal.
“I had understood there would be a way to do it without student fees,” Gregory said. “I don’t think it’s probably a good idea to fund this with a student fee.”
Despite the likelihood student fees will not fund the portal, it likely won’t be free, either, according to Gregory.
“It just seems to me, we’re facing such hard economic times, and the budget that I’ve seen for this is substantial and on-going,” Gregory said. “It would cost near $1 million to start up, and I think the business plan — the most recent business plan that Ralph [Caruso] presented said $600,000 a year, on-going. That’s a lot of money. I’m just not sure, with the budget cuts that we’re facing, that we should take on an additional expense like that. But that’s not to say that I think portals are a bad idea, I’m just trying to be realistic.”
“I’m not against portals. I can see the value to them, but this may be — given the financial times we’re in — this isn’t the right time to do a portal,” Gregory said. “Maybe some lower-cost alternative should be looked at, like enhancing Mainestreet a bit and not installing a full-blown portal.”
The University of Maine at Farmington currently uses a portal similar to the one the system hopes to employ. Farmington’s portal bears no cost to students and was built by the campus by combining several open-source programs into a framework. Fred Brittain, director of IT at Farmington, said the university put its model in place in 2001 and would likely upgrade to the system’s version when it became available.
“Our portal is also a little bit dated. We’d be happy to share the actual technology [with the system] if we thought it was appropriate,” Brittain said.
Brittain said he gave a presentation to the trustees recently alongside the vendor about the possibility of an open-source-based portal similar to Farmington’s. He said the possibility of creating a system-wide portal like Farmington’s exists, but the universities would first have to decide whether it would be best for students.
Brittain said the open-source route may require more staff to maintain versus a ready-made product that could possibly require less.
John Diamond, executive director of external affairs at the system office, said the vendor model that includes a student fee to pay for it is not the one Caruso and the campus IT directors are recommending.
Gregory said many of the functions a portal would include are already in FirstClass, and that UMaine would benefit more from having MaineStreet expanded to incorporate a single-sign-on function and deep drilling, both functions the portal would employ. Gregory defined deep drilling as an option that would allow a student, for example, to dig into other programs, such as MaineStreet, for information from multiple sources to use to customize their portal to their campus and their personal academics. He said it would not replace FirstClass — which is not a portal.
Gregory said in an e-mail that UMaine would likely benefit the least from a system-wide portal — compared to the other system campuses — because of its use of FirstClass. He said the single-sign-on function and deep drilling would be the most beneficial to UMaine.
“I think we’ll use the single-sign-on and I think we’ll use whatever drilling they do into Peoplesoft, those will be beneficial to us,” Gregory said. “Some of those other features, yeah, I don’t think we’ll be using them as much.”
Brittain expressed a desire for an open-source option without student fees.
“[The system needs to] weigh the cost and benefits of one versus the other. Clearly this is not the right time to be spending money. This is not the right time to be increasing student costs,” Brittain said.
Gregory said himself, the other campus IT directors and Caruso make up a visioning committee that met in September and October to review different options for portal design. Gregory said Caruso told him the system office had ruled out the student fee possibility. Caruso told The Maine Campus it wasn’t his decision; he said Rebecca Wyke, vice chancellor for Finance and Administration at the system office and the trustees would decide how to pay for the portal.
“I don’t think that at this stage that I can answer that question. That isn’t my decision,” Caruso said.
Gregory said one of the vendors that presented at a Sept. 30 meeting of the visioning committee is Unicon, a software consulting services firm that focuses on software portals for universities. It is unknown if Unicon is the vendor that offered the $20 per student fee estimate. Unicon presented two products to the committee: uPortal and Liferay, both open-source options.
Redonnett said the four options Caruso and the IT directors are considering are an open-source program from a vendor, joining a consortium of universities that use an open-source option, a portal developed by a vendor around a set of requirements defined by the system and a pre-developed solution from a company. She said about 70 percent of colleges and universities have software portals like the one proposed for the system or are currently working to create one.
Redonnett said the trustees will return to the portal issue in 2010.
“My impression from the outcome of the board meeting is that a more in-depth conversation will be held by the technology committee at its January meeting,” Redonnett said. “We haven’t made a final decision yet; we’ve got a long way to go.”
Redonnett said cost, vendor experience with portals and educational institutions and flexibility of the software are all factors the trustees and system are considering. She added the university system will not explore the possibility of a fee without student input.
As unlikely as the student fee may be, Redonnett said it is still an option the system is considering.
“At the same time you also have to look at every option, you have to look at every angle,” Redonnett said.
Gregory said there would likely be no cost savings for the system to exclude UMaine from the portal process.
Brittain said Farmington’s model is “extremely heavily used” on campus.
“I think that there are some different models being looked at for a system portal and there are some different models on how to fund the system portal,” Brittain said.
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- RIAA may sue 14 UM students (March 22, 2007)
We should all applaud IT director John Gregory for the position he stated in this article. Unless an open-source solution is used for any portal implemented, even if it does not cost students via student fees, it will cost them. The University is extremely stressed financially at the moment and for the foreseeable future, with the impacts of projected budget cuts estimated by many to result, in the worst case, in cuts of up to 1/4 to 1/3 of all departments and programs on campus. At a time like this, millions spent for what is ultimately a convenience is unwise. I believe that students would be best served by putting up with the current, inconvenient, situation while preserving as much academic quality and choice as possible. Even better, we should instead look to open source solutions, using in-house expertise — of which there is a great deal, both at the System level and in IT, as well as in our computing-related departments (computer science, etc.) and scattered throughout other departments across campus (witness the locally-developed Synapse courseware).
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Ron Kozlowski Reply:
December 1st, 2009 at 1:42 pm
It would seem to me that economically, it doesn’t make much sense to spend money to an outside company that will not in the end benefit the University. If you spent even a fraction of what it would cost for this proposed portal on an internal solution, like Synapse, it would not only benefit the University but the state as well.
It would bring national recognition to the University and the state of Maine.
Synapse which is partially built by students, can be customized for the needs of the University, might someday grow to the point that it could make money for the University and potentially become a company that would create many jobs for the state of maine. We need to start thinking of ways to not only keep money at the University of Maine but in this State. Spending money on a system that give money to a big corporation that resides in another state doesn’t help the state or the University of Maine. The University has talented faculty, staff and students that can accomplish anything they put their minds too. Isn’t it about time we used the resources in our state instead of looking beyond our borders?
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It is beyond belief that the UMS would invest this sort of money into new software when they are raising tuition and simultaneously slashing faculty, ending academic programs and making it harder for students to graduate on time.
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First, let me say thank you to both John Gregory and Roy Turner. Speaking as someone who has worked for the DoD, the private sector, my own business, and built my own home, this idea of spending far more than $600,000 every year from here on out is a very bad one, in any economy, let alone this one. That number is just the baseline. I would wager it does not even begin to cover the myriad costs of fleshing out, maintaining, integrating, and upgrading such a system. I think Roy hits the nail on the head. We should not be asking what expensive, outside, canned product can solve our problems with the false appearance of ease and simplicity. We should be researching, asking ourselves what we have, right here, right now, that can be leveraged to create a sustainable solution to our problems. As a simple example – could you fix any of the things in your home, office, or computer environments if they broke down? We all know what costs we incur when we rely on “experts” to perform tasks we should manage ourselves. Anyone who changes their own oil understands what I am getting at. This is only the most basic level of benefit in managing our own resources. If we create technology (or any other) solutions, that are comparable to the versions available at truly ignorant “enterprise” prices, we save money. If we create truly inspired, elegant solutions that are far superior to the boring, generic, pre-packaged answers available, we can turn around and market those creations to others like us, who can understand and appreciate their value. If you create an environment that encourages such creative efforts (with more than just words), you will not only see enrollment go up, you will see more students of high caliber enroll. Our reputation could be that of a second-rate school that fails to appreciate what it has to work with, and so clamors to pay out the nose for what others produce (be it amazing or pathetic). Our school could be known as a center for brilliant minds to thrive and create, to produce the next great solutions to our seemingly endless problems. I was fortunate enough to meet a teacher who once handed me a trowel and said “I never learned anything without the trowel in my hand, so you’re going to build this, and I am going to watch you do it”. Let’s use our own, build our own, and reap our own benefits.
– proud member of the Synapse development team
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