Author: Tyler Kearn
This past week, ITS made available to students the result of the biggest project it has yet undertaken— the brand new myOxy web portal http://my.oxy.edu. myOxy has the aim of becoming a far more useful tool to students when it comes to accessing and utilizing their online resources (directories, Moodle and Blackboard, webmail, and library databases) than anything the school has had in the past.
A “web portal” is essentially a site that takes all the information a user is typically looking for, and compiles it for them in one place to make things simple and easy. Web portals also tend to be customizable (think sites like iGoogle or myYahoo).
Oxy is far from the first school to launch a student, faculty and staff web portal. “The reason schools do this is because they want to have a public website for everybody, and a separate site for students and faculty,” Vice President Information Recourses/CIO Pamela McQuesten said. “The public probably doesn’t care what the Marketplace menu for today is.”A student web portal offers many advantages over what Oxy students have now, which is the “Current Students” section on the Oxy website.
“One thing that this portal does is what we call ‘single sign-on’,” McQuesten said. “What that means is that you only sign in once and then all the other resources that require a login will be accessible to you without having to sign in again. That’s a big convenience.”
Single sign-on through myOxy is also more secure than other methods of logging on because myOxy passes your “credentials” (usually username and password) to the system you are logging on to (be it webmail, Moodle, or something else).
myOxy is also capable of personalization, a feature that will become more useful as the site is improved. “We can target information to you specifically, based on your role at the college,” McQuesten said.
Currently, myOxy only differentiates between students, faculty and staff, but McQuesten said, “Eventually, we’ll be able to discriminate more narrowly. We’ll be able to give you information that’s almost as personalized as you can get.”myOxy is the result of the work of a multitude of people on campus. “There were over thirty people from across the campus involved in this project,” McQuesten said. “Everything from the Registrar’s Office to Admissions – faculty and staff all came together. Students were on the team. The initial beta-testing was done by the O-Team. We recently had a group of some 70 students who agreed to go in to the site at all hours and test all of the features.”
McQuesten said that it is really other people who deserve the credit for myOxy – there are people who have worked on it for “over 50 hours a week since January.”
That being said, the work on myOxy is not finished yet, and ITS has some ambitious goals for what their web portal can become. They want to have myOxy customized on an individual level (though there is a good degree of customization that the user can do to their page on their own).
The first part of that will be to have all of the links to the specific Moodle pages for the classes that a student is enrolled in right there on their homepage (this will probably happen next fall, when Blackboard is phased out and all of Oxy will be required to use Moodle).
There are also plans for some point further down the line to give student groups a way to have their own space on myOxy. Using myOxy, a student club or organization could upload files and send out announcements, which would show up on their members’ myOxy pages.
Students seem to have mixed impressions of myOxy, at least in this early iteration. Some students seem to feel that it is more useful and convenient than the Oxy site.
“It’s nice to have everything in one place,” Frances Power (first-year) said.
However, some students do not see the point of myOxy. “It has all the same things as the regular student page, but now you have to click though tabs, which just takes more time,” Justin Kubassek (junior) said.
While myOxy has gone public, it is still adding features and working to increase capabilities and it is certainly not done accepting feedback from students. In fact, there is a large “feedback” button on the upper right corner of the myOxy page so that students and staff can let ITS know what they think in order to improve the site.
For more details on the myOxy portal itself and a review of the site, see “Tyler the Tech Guy” in the Cal Arts section of this issue.
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