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A Portrait of Learning Portals
By Tom Barron
Though the term has been stretched across an impossibly broad collection of e-learning offerings, the learning portal concept is more than just marketing. Some call it the stirrings of a long-needed merger with knowledge management practices.
What is a learning portal? If you've ever tried sorting through vendor literature or the Web in search of an ironclad definition, you've probably given up by now. You can take comfort in knowing you're not alone. Even the heads of e-learning companies that offer learning portals of various stripes find themselves at odds over a basic definition.
The reason is simple: The term portal has been claimed by a wide variety of e-learning offerings that have little in common. And as part of a larger industry rush to embrace anything "portal," it's being bandied about wildly.
But behind the marketing veneer of portal fever, there's a solid concept--the notion of consolidating resources into one Website that's accessible to the internal and external customers that need it. While this basic organizational impulse may seem staid, the idea of centralizing information is practically revolutionary in today's wired business world, where information is fragmented across surging numbers of systems and Websites.
The IT arena is embracing the portal concept as an answer to that problem, and the Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) is the new rallying cry--and acronym du jour--for many IT organizations. The EIP, a single location that serves up data from systems throughout an organization, picks up where ERP applications and intranets left off. "Portals enable enterprises to extend knowledge management and business intelligence initiatives within and beyond the walls of their organization in ways that could not have been envisioned two years ago," proclaims an April cover story on EIPs in Knowledge Management magazine.
The learning portal scene
The e-learning field has its own corollary to the