Students at the University of Wisconsin will begin seeing changes to the university’s MyUW student portal beginning in 2015.
In an email sent Tuesday, DoIT outlined changes to the MyUW portal, home to student resources such as the Student Center and Course Guide. Currently, students can beta test the redesigned site and provide feedback on the changes, according to the university’s Division of Information Technology.
The new site will feature a responsive design, providing a mobile-friendly layout for users, according to DoIT spokesperson Brian Rust.
“The portal now is being reimagined for a handheld device first and then for desktop devices in addition to that,” he said.
Courtesy of DoIT
Users will be able to sign into their email through the site as well, whether they use WiscMail or Office 365, he said.
Another new feature in the portal is a notification for campus WiscAlerts. In addition to receiving an email, users will receive a notification of any campus alerts on the MyUW homepage, he said.
“We’re focusing on presenting personalized information … for which alerts make sense, so things that are time-sensitive, location-sensitive, deadline-sensitive will be woven into the portal,” Rust said.
No changes will be made to the Student Center portal as part of this redesign, since Student Center runs through a separate program, he said.
The changes to the portal are the first complete restructuring of the site since it launched in 2000, Rust said.
Several incremental changes have been made to individual modules in the portal since 2000, but after customer feedback DoIT formed a team to explore making changes to the site, he said.
The new portal is based off a open source platform called uPortal, and the open sourced nature will allow universities to collaborate on various features of their respective sites, Rust said.
“This is a pretty innovate version of a portal,” Rust said.
Several of the features the portal includes are unique to the uPortal platform, he said.
According to the project’s website, preliminary design was completed in 2013, and an early beta test launched in October. The current beta test launched December 1, and is open for users to experience and provide feedback.
DoIT plans to retire the current version of MyUW and replace it with the new MyUW portal sometime in 2015, according to its timeline.
