Academic literature on the topic 'Internet collaborative portals'

These Guidelines are one of the results of the four-year research project “Open Online Learning for Digital and Networked Society” (2017-2021). The project objective was to enable university teachers to design open and online learning through open and online learning curriculum and environment applying learning analytics as a metacognitive tool and creating open and online learning assessment and recognition practices, responding to the needs of digital and networked society. The research of the project resulted in 10 scientific publications and 2 studies prepared by Vytautas Magnus university Institute of Innovative Studies research team in collaboration with their international research partners from Germany, Spain and Portugal. The final stage of the research attempted creating open and online learning assessment and recognition practices, responding to the learner needs in contemporary digital and networked society. The need for open learning recognition has been increasing during the recent decade while the developments of open learning related to the Covid 19 pandemics have dramatically increased the need for systematic and high-quality assessment and recognition of learning acquired online. The given time also relates to the increased need to offer micro-credentials to learners, as well as a rising need for universities to prepare for micro-credentialization and issue new digital credentials to learners who are regular students, as well as adult learners joining for single courses. The increased need of all labour - market participants for frequent and fast renewal of competences requires a well working and easy to use system of open learning assessment and recognition. For learners, it is critical that the micro-credentials are well linked to national and European qualification frameworks, as well as European digital credential infrastructures (e.g., Europass and similar). For employers, it is important to receive requested quality information that is encrypted in the metadata of the credential. While for universities, there is the need to properly prepare institutional digital infrastructure, organizational procedures, descriptions of open learning opportunities and virtual learning environments to share, import and export the meta-data easily and seamlessly through European Digital Hub service infrastructures, as well as ensure that academic and administrative staff has digital competencies to design, issue and recognise open learning through digital and micro-credentials. The first chapter of the Guidelines provides a background view of the European Qualification Framework and National Qualification frameworks for the further system of gaining, stacking and modelling further qualifications through open online learning. The second chapter suggests the review of current European policy papers and consultations on the establishment of micro-credentials in European higher education. The findings of the report of micro-credentials higher education consultation group “European Approach to Micro-credentials” is shortly introduced, as well as important policy discussions taking place. Responding to the Rome Bologna Comunique 2020, where the ministers responsible for higher education agreed to support lifelong learning through issuing micro-credentials, a joint endeavour of DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion and DG Research and Innovation resulted in one of the most important political documents highlighting the potential of micro-credentials towards economic, social and education innovations. The consultation group of experts from the Member States defined the approach to micro-credentials to facilitate their validation, recognition and portability, as well as to foster a larger uptake to support individual learning in any subject area and at any stage of life or career. The Consultation Group also suggested further urgent topics to be discussed, including the storage, data exchange, portability, and data standards of micro-credentials and proposed EU Standard of constitutive elements of micro-credentials. The third chapter is devoted to the institutional readiness to issue and to recognize digital and micro-credentials. Universities need strategic decisions and procedures ready to be enacted for assessment of open learning and issuing micro-credentials. The administrative and academic staff needs to be aware and confident to follow these procedures while keeping the quality assurance procedures in place, as well. The process needs to include increasing teacher awareness in the processes of open learning assessment and the role of micro-credentials for the competitiveness of lifelong learners in general. When the strategic documents and procedures to assess open learning are in place and the staff is ready and well aware of the processes, the description of the courses and the virtual learning environment needs to be prepared to provide the necessary metadata for the assessment of open learning and issuing of micro-credentials. Different innovation-driven projects offer solutions: OEPass developed a pilot Learning Passport, based on European Diploma Supplement, MicroHE developed a portal Credentify for displaying, verifying and sharing micro-credential data. Credentify platform is using Blockchain technology and is developed to comply with European Qualifications Framework. Institutions, willing to join Credentify platform, should make strategic discussions to apply micro-credential metadata standards. The ECCOE project building on outcomes of OEPass and MicroHE offers an all-encompassing set of quality descriptors for credentials and the descriptions of learning opportunities in higher education. The third chapter also describes the requirements for university structures to interact with the Europass digital credentials infrastructure. In 2020, European Commission launched a new Europass platform with Digital Credential Infrastructure in place. Higher education institutions issuing micro-credentials linked to Europass digital credentials infrastructure may offer added value for the learners and can increase reliability and fraud-resistant information for the employers. However, before using Europass Digital Credentials, universities should fulfil the necessary preconditions that include obtaining a qualified electronic seal, installing additional software and preparing the necessary data templates. Moreover, the virtual learning environment needs to be prepared to export learning outcomes to a digital credential, maintaining and securing learner authentication. Open learning opportunity descriptions also need to be adjusted to transfer and match information for the credential meta-data. The Fourth chapter illustrates how digital badges as a type of micro-credentials in open online learning assessment may be used in higher education to create added value for the learners and employers. An adequately provided metadata allows using digital badges as a valuable tool for recognition in all learning settings, including formal, non-formal and informal.

The increased use of online services in the commercial world has produced considerable impact on traditional technologies. Traditional information technologies were developed in an era where use of Internet technologies was not widespread. They have a long history and are often based on mature and stable technologies, or practices such as user interface design, artifi- cial intelligence techniques, and so forth. In the era of e-business, business operations are often conducted in conjunction with business alliances and partners through networked activities. Internet (or Web-based) technologies are fulfilling an enabling role to meet the communication and collaboration requirements of e-business. In this article, we share our experiences in how traditional information technologies are coupled with Webbased technologies to gain much-needed leverage in offering e-business solutions. Portals, as the major communication media for Web users, offer opportunities for collaboration using multiple technologies. They also serve as mechanisms for integrating a variety of online services supported by traditional applications. In this article we will discuss the role of portals in application integration for online collaborative service delivery. Particular emphasis will be given to the marrying of the modern roles of portals in e-business with those roles where portals fulfil the traditional roles of front-end technologies. The article demonstrates its vision through a portal-based application integration solution framework associated with a typical application scenario. We demonstrate the effectiveness of using portals in application integration by employing an experimental framework implemented in the PHOENIX research project at Victoria University (http://www.staff.vu.edu. au/PHOENIX/phoenix/index1.htm).

E-collaboration, defined as “collaboration among individuals engaged in a common task using electronic technologies” (Kock, Davison, Ocker, & Wazlawick, 2001), is increasingly gaining relevance at the interorganizational level because of the growing practice of working with dispersed project teams across the globe. E-collaboration links together partners on projects and business processes that cross legal boundaries, as is the case, for example, in supply chains and in product lifecycle management (PLM) teams. General purpose computer-based collaboration tools like the Internet, e-mails, instant messaging, discussion boards, groupware, portals, blogs, and wikis are commonly used for e-collaboration (Fichter, 2005), while task-specific tools exist for many interorganizational activities such as PLM or collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CPFR).

Portals are information systems that support the user in his or her individual process with information production and communication. The term portal, in information technology terms, appeared in late 1990s at a time of the widespread use of the Internet by individuals and organizations (Finkelstein & Aiken, 1999; Dias, 2001; Bristow, Dickinson, Duke, Henry, & Makey, 2001; Collins, 2001, 2003). There are many types of portals on the Internet: portals for general consumer use and entertainment (my.yahoo.com), for specialized information (www.brint.com), for specific communities (Austrian Academic Portal at www.portal.ac.at/), for business enterprises (NEC global portal at www.nec.com, NEC US portal at www.necus. com/, NEC European portal at www.neceurope. com). In general, portals can be divided into two categories: public and enterprise (Goodman & Kleinschmidt, 2003; Forrester, 2003). Public portals started as Internet directories (Yahoo!) or search engines (Excite, Lycos, Alta- Vista, and InfoSeek). Services that require user registration such as free e-mail, customization features, and chat rooms were added to allow repeated use, and to make users stay longer at the site. Enterprise portals started as intranets and extranets, the “enterprise webs” that were intended to provide easy-to-use, secure, and personalized sites that may extend to an organization’s employees as well as to its customers and business partners. Enterprise portals evolved to include collaboration tools so that customers, business partners, and employees are empowered to maximize their value to the organization. Portals that combine Web communications and thinking inside large enterprises are considered as both a labor-saving and a cost-saving technology. Enterprise portals are also referred to as corporate portals. Some corporate analysts predict that portals spending will be one of the top five areas for growth in the Internet technologies sector.

Organizations are increasingly turning to enterprise portals to support knowledge work. Portal deployment can be intradepartmental across several business units in one organization or even inter-organizational. Currently in the industry, most of these portals are purchased solutions (e.g., collaboration and smart enterprise suites) and many of these purchasing and selection decisions are primarily driven by the interest of a small group of stakeholders with strong influence from IT vendors. The true requirements for the portal as well as the strategy for its medium- to long-term phased deployment are, in general, poorly addressed. This, together with other reasons, has lead to many failures or to a low adoption rate of the enterprise portal by staff at various levels of an organization. Common problems that hinder portal adoption include lack of an overall governance model, mis-alignment with business processes, poor or non-existent content management (process, tools, and governance), and technical problems associated with the development and configuration of portlets. This article focuses on one critical issue that directly influences the success of an enterprise portal deployment, namely the correct elicitation of user requirements (which in turn lead to the chosen portal’s features and to the style of the portal interface). Taking into consideration the advancement and landscape of commercial portal vendors in the market, this article discusses a bottom-up approach to the identification of high-level drivers for portal usages for its users.

This chapter discusses the roles of electronic business solutions (EBSs) in supporting collaborative product development (CPD). Two fundamental questions are of primary interest. One is when and where EBSs should be applied for what CPD decision activities. The other is how EBSs should be designed and developed to maximize their usefulness and usability in supporting CPD decision activities. The author advocates an approach based on decision activities. By this approach, CPD is considered as an extended enterprise business process, which is in turn decomposed into relatively simpler business decision processes (e.g., design specification, design review and release, design change management, etc.). Such decomposition takes place towards the level where appropriate EBSs can be most cost-effectively designed, developed, and applied. The logics and data requirements of these business decision processes form the natural basis for designing the navigations and user interfaces as well as the back-end databases and middleware for the corresponding EBSs. Individual EBSs related to product design and development decisions are then collated and deployed to form what is described in this chapter as a collaborative product commerce (CPC) portal — a special enterprise portal. The proposed approach is demonstrated with several examples as has been followed by many researchers and practitioners.

The library catalogue has represented stagnant technology for close to two decades. An ideal Library catalogue should enable the end users to search and find material/resources without the help of a librarian. The introduction of Web 2.0 has helped to improve the basic functionality of the library catalogue and help it to adapt to the new trends. Web 2.0 has opened the climate for collaboration and participation where users no longer only receive but also create and share content. In the Internet age today the Library Catalogue can function like a portal and this function can be exploited by redirecting the users to other useful information. System designers are continuously trying to adopt new trends in OPACs. In the 21st century such a shift from the simple catalogue to the web enriched advanced catalogue is anticipated and welcomed.

Education is one of the key sectors that has benefited from the continuous developments and innovations in information and communication technology (ICT). Web-based facilities now provide a medium for learning and a vehicle for information dissemination and knowledge creation (Khine, 2003). Accordingly, developments in ICTs provide opportunities for educators to expand and refine frameworks for delivering courses in innovative and interactive ways that assist students achieve learning outcomes (Kamel & Wahba, 2003). However, the adoption of ICTs has also created tensions between traditional control and directiveness in teaching and student- centred learning, which relies on flexibility, connectivity, and interactivity of technology-rich environments. This chapter examines the introduction of Web-based technologies within a media studies course. The objective was to establish a community of learning, which provides students with a portal or entranceway into a common work area and out to networks of media related organizations. So doing, a pilot study was conducted within the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University to blend Weblog facilities with a classroom setting to enhance students’ interpersonal and content interaction, and build citizenship through participation and collaborative processes. Four key aims frame this study: 1. provide an accessible, interactive online environment in which students can participate with peers and engage with new media technologies within a learning community setting; 2. develop an instructional technology framework that enhances the learning experience and outcomes within online educative environments; 3. establish a portal or gateway for students to access media advocacy and special interest groups and enhance and diversify perspectives on global media; and 4. evaluate student-learning experiences facilitated through innovative online instructional technologies.

Nowadays, Industry 4.0 is becoming a strategic issue for software companies. Because of fast digital conversion, they should review their visions and strategies. In this study, a project management framework is proposed for software companies considering Industry 4.0 as a future strategy. Global ERP firms try to find a good integration of ERP and Industry 4.0 applications. A global ERP firm's solution partner is used as a case study in this chapter. The study includes: the development of an internet-based portal application that integrates all their business partners (customers, suppliers); a collaborative project management software; and an industry 4.0 portal. The benefits of this study after applying in the software house are explained.

Nowadays, Industry 4.0 is becoming a strategic issue for software companies. Because of fast digital conversion, they should review their visions and strategies. In this study, a project management framework is proposed for software companies considering Industry 4.0 as a future strategy. Global ERP firms try to find a good integration of ERP and Industry 4.0 applications. A global ERP firm's solution partner is used as a case study in this chapter. The study includes: the development of an internet-based portal application that integrates all their business partners (customers, suppliers); a collaborative project management software; and an industry 4.0 portal. The benefits of this study after applying in the software house are explained.

The Brazilian Chamber of Deputies (Câmara dos Deputados) conducts an e-democracy initiative that enables people to participate in political decisions regarding legislation. “Portal E-Democracia” is the name of this website in which people can participate in several different ways to speak their minds regarding legislative activities. This chapter analyses the effectiveness of citizens' engagement in the e-democracy initiative through the case study of the discussion of the Internet Civilian Landmark – a bill to regulate Internet use in Brazil. The authors analyse two types of participation: comments to the draft bill and suggestions. To measure the effectiveness of user-participation in such a case of collaborative lawmaking, the authors compare the content of the first draft, the final draft, and the suggestions made through the wikilegis in order to assess whether the discussions maintained within the e-democracy platform were or were not taken into account. This procedure also reveals to what extent online discussion was able to reach political decision-makers and effectively change the Internet's Bill of Rights.

The product development processes nowadays are featured with ever-increasing complexity of product configurations, diverse data resources, and multi-disciplinary, geographical dispersed engineering teams, and intensive use of various software tools for managing the data associated with the product and its life cycle. These characteristics result in the need of a collaborative product development (CPD) environment for today’s industries. This paper describes the methodology which enables the engineering collaboration within a compressed product development cycle, and presents our results with the development of a CPD environment. A four-tiered client/server collaboration architecture, which allows system integration, data sharing, and collaboration among team members in an internet platform, is described. By integrating the distributed application servers, such as product specification server, CAD/CAE server, project management, collaborative visualization workspace, and product data management module, using web technologies, an engineering CPD portal is proposed and implemented. This portal environment could bring entire engineering team together in one place in real-time, irrespective of geography, enterprise boundaries, or native systems, to share product information throughout the product development processes, which include product definition, design, engineering analysis, and manufacturing, etc. Manufacturing companies could therefore collaborate closely with their suppliers/collaborators global widely. A case study is carried out for collaborative development of a typical component used in data storage industry, the spindle motor, to illustrate the proposed approach and to validate the developed systems.

Canspec’s Pipeline Integrity Group typically collects data on more than 500 dig sites annually, which includes analyzing and maintaining thousands of records for each major client. Additionally, Canspec also provides time sensitive information and guidance to its clientele related to repairs, pipe replacement, and collaborative pipeline integrity research. In order to improve data management and decrease reporting time on this large volume of data, Canspec initiated a short-term pilot project in collaboration with Bridge Solutions to develop an internet-based portal program called EKP3.0. The web portal is a fast and efficient way to create a secure customized search engine and web directory for complete data management, which is also accessible to the large number of field crews performing this work. Since implementation in April 2003, the EKP3.0 software has reduced overall reporting time by more than 35%. Due to the overwhelming success of the short-term pilot project, Canspec has adopted this software as a long-term solution for ongoing data management. This paper will compare previous data collection, delivery, and reporting practices with the current internet-based EKP3.0 software process. It will also elaborate on future plans to design an XML (Extensible Markup Language) data transfer format, which will reduce the labour-intensive peer review process, automate the customization of final reports delivered to the client, and create a rules-based field data collection application.

Large industrial internal combustion engines employ a wide range of analytical techniques in order to improve their availability and fuel efficiency, and to decrease their maintenance expense. When viewed in context of reliability centered maintenance programs, most industrial engines rely on one of the following systems: • Time-based preventive maintenance analyses, • Continuous monitoring systems that have first-principles deterministic models, or • Run until failure operating philosophy. Predictive analytics using empirically-derived pattern recognition algorithms can enhance problem detection and increase the effectiveness of an organization’s monitoring program. With robust early detection that has few false alarms, equipment operators can remove time-dependent randomness from their ability to discover problems. Skilled equipment analysts and technicians will no longer spend time devoted to analyzing healthy equipment. When a company has numerous engine installations, scalability and cost-effectiveness becomes increasingly more important. Empirically-derived pattern recognition speeds fleet deployment across a wide range of equipment types and models. This reduces the dependence on the expertise that is required to establish and maintain a first-principles based system. Predictive analytics enables a bridge between the depth of coverage of a permanently installed full analytical system and the versatility of portable analyzers and preventive maintenance analyses. Equipment operators can use early detection from predictive analytics to focus their technicians on analyzing the right equipment at the right time. This paper will describe the predictive analytics modeling philosophy around frame mechanics, combustion, and emissions. One or more case studies will show the processes of even detection, diagnostics, collaboration, and information consolidation. The extension of predictive analytics is predictive diagnostics which combines detection with the context of how equipment operates. Equipment operators can extend run times and maintenance intervals by using predictive analytics as a foundation. The observations, diagnoses, and feedback will then roll up into a total asset management system and bridge major gaps that occur in many reliability programs. Predictive diagnostic methodologies enable equipment owners to extend run times and to decrease maintenance effort with confidence.