Contact information
Elena del Giorgio, elena.delgiorgio@4euplus.eu; secretariat@4euplus.eu
Overall goals
The 4EU+ Alliance’s focus on interoperability is not a new one but has been there since the beginning of the cooperation in 2019, because we see it as crucial for any deeper cooperation not only in education and research. The pillars of our collaboration in the digital area are the 4EU+ Student Portal, which is aimed to be a central hub for students and education, umbrella Learning Management System, which should create space for easier mobility for both students and staff, and shared working space across the alliance members.
Use Cases
User identity (Use Case 7)
Baseline:
The 4EU+ Student Portal (https://sp.4euplus.eu/) is the go-to website for alliance students looking to explore vast offer of courses and learning modules, their options for mobility, as well as seeking more information about 4EU+ Flagship programs, educational projects or learning pathways. It offers a centralized location for all the information a student might need to make informed decisions about their 4EU+ education. The development of the Student Portal is divided into several modules, each catering to specific aspects of student life:
Student Portal Core System: This forms the foundation of the portal, providing essential functionality and navigation features.
Catalogue of Education Courses: A comprehensive repository of all educational courses available, ensuring that students can easily search for, filter, and select the courses that align with their interests and academic goals.
Catalogue of Mobility Programs: Students can explore various mobility programs, such as study abroad opportunities, internships, and exchange programs, to enrich their educational experience.
Catalogue of Training Tools: This section offers an array of educational resources and tools to aid students in their learning journey, enhancing their academic success.
More modules are envisioned for the future, among others a document repository for the students’ personal documentation, including their learning micro credentials.
Goal:
The current goal is to enhance the core functionality of the Student Portal by introducing a login feature (https://sp.4euplus.eu/login) that will enable delivery of new personalized modules for students. To ensure usability and a seamless experience, we plan to leverage the eduGain identity federation, allowing all students from all alliance universities to access the portal using their home institution credentials (so that no new credentials need to be issued).
Work plan:
The pilot phase has been already completed. At the moment six out of eight universities have confirmed that their users can access the Student Portal using their home accounts via the eduGAIN federation.
The next step is to finalize the process for the remaining two universities, so that all students from all alliance universities can log into the Student Portal using their home accounts. In detail this means:
One university is undergoing an upgrade of its own identity management system. When completed, the new system will be tested internally by the university, registered in eduGAIN and its integration with the Student Portal will be tested.
One university is to verify its eduGAIN and network configuration to ensure data exchange between its own identity management system to the Student Portal.
Standards used:
Users, services and organizations who need to easily and securely manage access to services benefit from identity federations because they enable them to reuse their existing systems to operate across borders without having to make many individual agreements. eduGAIN provides an efficient, flexible way for participating universities and their affiliated users and services, to interconnect. It is part of GEANT (https://geant.org/) being the collaboration of European National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). It is co-founded by the EU. For more information see https://edugain.org/about-edugain/key-concepts/.
Institutional identity (Use Case 8)
Baseline:
Within the 4EU+ Alliance, we have so far been using highly fragmented technologies and products (MS Teams, Google Workspace, Zoom, and others). This is due to historical reasons and the specific situations at individual universities. The differences between these technologies often complicate simple and effective collaboration for alliance members, such as scheduling meetings, sharing documents and calendars, or communicating via chat.
Therefore, in the previous period, we conducted an analysis aimed at proposing a unified technological platform to be used by the entire alliance for internal communication. As the unified communication environment for the 4EU+ Alliance, Microsoft technologies were selected, specifically MS Teams and SharePoint Portal Server (SPPS).
Goal:
The goal for the upcoming period is to implement an MS Teams tenant for the entire alliance and to gradually connect individual stakeholders to this tenant, ensuring that communication among alliance members is simple and user-friendly. This is planned for the near future.
Work plan:
At present, we expect the completion of the registration of the alliance under Belgian law, which will enable us to start purchasing Microsoft Teams licenses for educational purposes. Once these licenses are ordered, we will begin working with the selected Belgian implementation company on building the technical environment for operating the tenant.
Standards used:
As standards, we have decided to adopt Microsoft technologies due to their widespread use, simplicity, and cost-effectiveness in the field of education. See chapter 4 Manage educational resources, 5 Generate data, 7 User identity.