The owners define their Internet service „Deutscher Bildungsserver“ (DBS) as the central directory for educational information on the Internet. As a meta-server it mainly refers to information provided by third parties, mostly their own offers, at all levels of the German education system. An important criterion for the quality of the offers is how quickly resp. how easily the different user groups can find the information that is relevant for them. Besides the traditional ways of searching, also the so-called Web 2.0 technologies provide new possibilities to retrieve and evaluate Internet offers. The federal government, the state governments and the Deutsche Institut für Internationale Pädagogische Forschung (DIPF, German Institute for International Pedagogic Research), which is responsible for the operation and strategic development of the portal, therefore agreed to have the DBS evaluated in a study on the possible use and development potentials.

Against this background, ifib has been engaged to evaluate the DBS. By analysing strengths and weaknesses, the DBS will be compared with other education portals in Germany focussing on the following sub-goals:

1. Analysing the use potential and corresponding recommendations based on qualitative and quantitative findings concerning the current user behaviour;
   
2. Analysing the development potential of Web 2.0 offers with regard to (target group-specific) user requirements;
   
3. Portfolio analysis and resulting activity options concerning profile and perspectives of the portal;
   
4. Investigating the relation between overall and addressee-specific information offers;
   
5. Analysing synergy potentials and differentiation requirements between DBS, state education servers and similar offers.
   

From the results of the analyses, recommendations will be deduced, which will serve as a basis for the strategic further development of the DBS in the future.

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