Author(s)

Haibo Yi and Zhe Nie

Corresponding Author

Haibo Yi

ABSTRACT

Online applications of Internet are ubiquitous influences in the development of students at institutions of higher education. Web portal is one type of online application of Internet that has grown rapidly in prevalence and popularity in recent years. Web portal is most often one specially designed Internet web site that brings information together from diverse sources in a uniform way. However, few of them can offer efficient services of learning and entertainment for students at institutions of higher education. In this paper, we design an efficient web portal for students at institutions of higher education, which can advances student learning and entertainment. The web portal is designed based on a multi-process web crawler, which can bring information of learning and entertainment together from diverse sources on Internet in a uniform way. Our web portal provides a consistent look and feel with access control and procedures for multiple applications and databases of learning and entertainment, which otherwise would have been different web entities at various URLs. We divide the web portal into five functional modules, i.e. login module, administrator module, crawler module, learning module and entertainment module. By integrating the designs of five modules, we use Microsoft ASP.Net (version 4.0) and SQL Server (version 2008) to implement the web portal based on three-tier B/S architecture.

KEYWORDS

Web portal, Students, Institutions of higher education, Web crawler