HP Learning Portals: Access for all

Today, Web-based learning portals are key to delivering this type of "equal opportunity" access across the hall, across the campus or even across the country. As students, parents, teachers and faculty demand access anywhere and anytime, learning portals provide a gateway – a unified place to access resources from instructional tools, content and student records to assessment and reporting capabilities.

Imagine how a learning portal could change the lives of the teachers, administrators, students and parents above ...

• With online access to lesson plans, test results, and attendance records, the science professor sees the student was absent when a key concept was introduced. Working with the student after school, the teacher fills the learning gap, sends both student and parent training materials to reinforce the lesson – and the student "aces" the make-up test.
• As the university’s teacher to student ratio falls, the professors at each campus tap into a Web portal to collaborate over course content and new ideas, leveraging each other’s work.
• At the community college, a portal provides instructors with access to productivity tools that free them to focus less on administrative tasks and more on teaching.
• As parents and students access a personalized Web portal with enhanced security features to view the day’s lesson online, together they can find that x=y. The child also works collaboratively online with other students – building a strong learning network.

All this takes an integrated, agile learning portal solution – a gateway that connects people to insightful information and to each other. HP’s Managed Learning Gateway Solution combines HP technology, solutions and services with proven solutions from third-party providers to build this gateway – helping you to raise the standard of education for all.

Learning portals break down barriers and build bridges between people and information. The goal is to bring together learning communities, from across the campus or around the globe, to provide more universal access to information. That takes integrating people, processes and technology, opening up a gateway for communication and collaboration.

In education, where every penny must be justified, integration on such a wide scale simply cannot mean totally replacing legacy systems. The answer is to work with HP to integrate your new solutions into your existing environment, while focusing on reducing overall IT costs.

HP services can help you plan, deploy, integrate, manage and fully support the integrated IT environment that makes learning portals possible and help you identify ways to lower computing costs.

Standards-based HP technology and solutions create a learning gateway for seamless interoperability across the learning environment – unifying faculty, teachers, students and parents. In Punahou School in Hawaii, HP supports a K-12 education portal that scales to reach more than 50,000 people. In California’s Tracy Unified School District, a portal provides administrators, teachers and students with simplified access to data and assignments stored within multiple applications – all accessible via a single interface, anywhere there is an Internet connection.

Further, HP is taking advantage of opportunities to work with content providers who are outstanding in their fields to enrich the teaching and learning process, including textbook publishers and specialized software companies, to offer a customized experience via the learning portal.

A single, Web-based sign-in opens the door to teacher collaboration within and across departments for leveraged learning opportunities: Students learn about Di Vinci the painter in art class and Di Vinci the inventor in science class, while the social studies teacher covers Italy – helping students develop a full appreciation for this world figure and the culture he came from.

Students and parents can collaborate with teachers and administration via this interactive portal, which can scale from one school thousands of users, transcending social and geographic boundaries. HP’s global reach and broad portfolio of solutions, from front-end wired and wireless access devices to the back-end infrastructure, makes such wide-scale access possible.

For example, at Des Moines Area Community College, HP ProLiant servers, an HP Storage Area Network, HP iPAQ Pocket PCs and HP Tablet PCs work together to deliver a multi-campus education portal – known as "my.dmacc" to users.

• Sixty years of experience in serving the public sector
• Proven track record in implementing solutions at all levels of education
• A broad, deep portfolio for complete solutions
• Standards-based technology with proven multi-vendor integration experience
• Fully supported solutions
• Strategic relationships and certified professional expertise in leading educational software
• Global reach

HP can help you integrate data from instructional and administrative systems so instructors can continually track and assess student performance. Replacing paper-based gradebooks, assessments, curriculum and other student records with online, portal-access to integrated information presents new possibilities to gain valuable insight into student progress.

Armed with this insight, instructors can personalize the learning experience for individual students or groups of students with more innovative, engaging and relevant content, geared to their particular learning needs, skills and styles.

For example, HP helped the State of Michigan create a learning portal that delivers a one-to-one educational experience for students across reading, language arts and social studies. As part of the State’s Freedom to Learn Program, a wireless network provides a powerful communication and collaboration tools for teachers, parents and more than 19,000 middle school students. This is just one example of how the state, schools and HP can work together to increase learning.