Contact information
Giovanni Fonseca, giovanni.fonseca@uni-potsdam.de; Jose Traver, traverj@uji.es
Overall goals
The European Digital UniverCity (EDUC) aims to transform European higher education by creating an open, agile, and inclusive university community. Our alliance values diversity, multilingualism, and collaboration, recognizing that together, we can achieve more than individually. We joined the early adopters group to exchange ideas and best practices with other alliances and institutions facing similar challenges. By harmonizing our efforts, we can drive digitalization in a sustainable and inclusive way, leveraging our collective strengths and experiences to create a more resilient and effective alliance, ultimately shaping the European higher education landscape for the 21st century.
Use Cases
Apply and get recognition (Use Case 2)
Baseline:
Since 2022 EDUC has a centralized Catalogue of learning opportunities to promote them to the alliance members and simplify the application process for the participants. This can happen within the EDUC catalogue based on the first comes first served principle that we established at the beginning of our collaboration. With the time the learning opportunities have diversified, and the application process requires more information from applicant’s side and more involvement of different stakeholders during the selection process. Therefore, we are working on a new version which will offer those capabilities. At me moment the preliminary way we found to certify the achievement of competencies development within a learning opportunity is by issuing a certificate via our LMS (Moodle) but we are planning to transition to Europass in the future.
Goal:
Start to harmonise prerequisites and credit recognition, and other administrative processes of learning opportunities lifecycle, and further foster the inter-institutional policies and rules needed for that. Improve automatisation of manual procedures.
Work plan:
In the framework of our Virtual Campus Group, continue the already started work on the following phases to identify local administrative process and harmonise their flows within the EDUC common digital infrastructure.
Phase I: Mapping and understanding the current state of local transformation of partners. The goal is to understand local practices and constraints. Each university business process will be mapped using BPMN 2.0. Sharing the experience and best practices acquired and understanding where the attachment points between the alliance level and the local level are.
Phase II: Definition of what is expected of EDUC in terms of information and services. What does EDUC need to provide for local processes to run smoothly.
Phase III: Working on ideal and more unified processes and imagining a way of walking toward them. Defining a theoretical trajectory.
In the framework of the Task 2.1 Sustainable Virtual Campus
Run the first phases of the first prototype of sharing credits using EMREX between the EDUC Common digital infrastructure and the University of South Eastern Norway, which has already joined the EMREX network.
Connection with Use Case 7: What attributes do we need to agree on in order to implement automatization of admin and recognition processes.
Standards to be used:
ELM
EuroPass
User identity (Use Case 7)
Baseline:
A common IdP base in EduGAIN authentication has been implemented to offer access to all members of the different alliance members to almost all common services. An SSO experience is implemented. Non centralized identity providers are being substituted by this common approach.
Goal:
Improve discovery and proxy service for Authentication services and add seamlessly identity and other attributes exchange, so roles are better matched to the ones in each service.
Work plan:
Design phase:
Agree on common attributes to be used
Review Data protection (GDPR information) and publish it
Review security checks to improve connections (2FA, strong authentication methods, HTTPS, certs, etc.)
Technical phase (current attributes)
Deploy CI/CD automation of image building and testing sites (Discovery services)
Registration of the new SP metadata for discovery services
Rollout of new common attributes
Agreement on new common attributes to release
Check with NRENs attribute release adequacy
Standards to be used:
SAML
EDUPERSON
SCHAC
eIDAS