Development of Mathematics Portal

As part of modernizing teaching methodologies in today's modern and scientific world, the Department of Mathematics(KNUST) created a web Portal in order to increase both local and international exposure. This was to help fulfill the Department's goal of providing current information to Students, Faculty members, affiliates  as well as using it as a means to enhance the Department's collaboration with other  universities outside Ghana.

The objective of the project to create the portal included but obviously not limited to the following;

1. A virtual classroom for course management (eg. notes, assignments, exams etc)
2. Provision of first hand information about the Department, research and services offered by the Department.
3. Provision of facilities for student, in the form of forums and its related features
4. Showcasing profiles of lecturers and staff and identifying them with the Department's corporate e-mails.
5. Provision of emails specifically to run the virtual classroom for Academic staff, Research/teaching Assistants and students.
6. The provision of a platform for publications such as abstracts,  Student projects and thesis within the Department.
7. Showcase exhibitions, activities, events and photo gallery.
8. Subscription of Newsletter for interested site users, alumni and senior members.
9. Presented the entire academic events in a calendar mode.
10. and many more...

In order to achieve the above objective a Content Management based Portal was designed based on mordern technologies. Both design and development had been in line with the Department's goals and objectives. The following had been observed;

1.The Portal is designed such that it would help the Department streamline its publishing processes. It would allow the Department to develop an information architecture that is robust, yet flexible and able to manage the content efficiently and cost-effectively.

2.The Portal makes it easier to create, edit and publish content on a website. Historically, website publishing has required significant technical skills (HTML, programming). The  Portal allows non-technical authors and editors to easily and quickly publish their content.

3.The Portal makes it possible for one to manage who creates, edits and publishes content. Because it establishes defined publishing processes, specific publishing rights are allocate to various individuals.

4.By easing technical hurdles in the publication of content, the Portal has reduced the need for training, while facilitating more people to publish. At the same time, the daily stream of calls to the administrator of the Portal is reduced.

5.The Portal also allows for the design of common and consistent information architecture (metadata, classification, navigation, search, layout and design) in order to avoid inconsistent and poorly designed information architectures that may plague the portal.

6.It allows consistent management of metadata through content template structures. Of the many benefits this delivers, is a significantly improved search process. Basically, since the appropriate metadata is captured on all documents, people can find the right content a lot more quickly.

7.Security being an important issue the Portal has been made to facilitate better content security. It can control who is allowed to publish to the website, and who is allowed to see what content there is.

In all we considered various factors, including, but not limited to: general coding issues; cross-browser compatibility issues; user-friendliness; back-end structural needs; growth and maintenance issues; marketing and advertising possibilities; and, of course, the overall "look and feel" of the portal.

...The information about the design and development of this site has just began.

Stay tuned for more.

Adepts