Contact information
Janina Fengel, janina.fengel@h-da.de
Overall goals
The European University of Technology (EUt+) is an alliance of nine technological universities with the mission to fundamentally reimagine technological higher education. It is presently working on deepening its institutional integration and linking all activities supporting the creation of the EUt+ European Degree and development of European curricula by gradually converging the national curricula. This leads to the need of being able to exchange and process data from different sources provided from a multiplicity of systems in use across the members. For further advancing applying the common standards of the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework are to provide the conceptual basis for this.
Use Cases
Discover (Use Case 1)
Baseline:
Within EUt+ the convergence of national curricula towards European curricula has begun by way of creating so-called clusters. These clusters are created in various thematic fields to address this structure the knowledge and align academic content across the member institutions. They are built within the same framework for offering integrated programs. The key tools developed for this are the EUt+ Competency Framework, which defines the core skills and learning outcomes expected across all programs; the EUt+ Reference Guide, which supports the design of joint curricula; and the EUt+ Certificate, awarded to students as a recognition of their participation in an EUt+ educational pathway. Thereby, agreement on vocabulary and leaning outcome specifications has been achieved. To date, about 25.000 credits as per ECTS between the EUt+ alliance members have been shared for automatic recognition. As a digital support, the EUt+ Mobility Map has been developed and is in live production stage as a strategic digital platform for students to explore academic opportunities across the alliance (accessible at https://info-mobility.univ-tech.eu/en/). However, for truly offering seamless student mobility across the member universities, enabling joint operation based on an overarching information management for digital processing is of the essence. The mobility is more than a course catalogue, however automated curriculum management is the next step intended.
Goal:
In order to conceptualise and develop automated procedures for updating and maintaining the curricula in a way that allows for mobility support, a mapping from the partner systems the sending and receiving data is required based on an extension of the given data model based on using European standards to ensure scalability, and potential further extension of the systems to new partners or cooperating alliances.
Work plan:
The work plan is of rather concise nature. Each of the partners needs to provide the applicable specifics of their system within the next two months. Developing the mapping to a joint data exchange format will involve the analysis and decision for the detailed approach and standards to align to. This is foreseen for the beginning of the coming year, so that by February validation and the next steps towards creating the required mediator can be approached and addressed as of the coming academic year.
Standards to be used:
At the moment it is assumed that the EWP Courses API and the ELM can provide the starting point while it needs to be seen how CASE or ESCO might to be included.
User identity (Use Case 7)
Baseline:
Based on the EUt+ mobility tool for students’ discovery and choosing of possibilities for a mobility and course selection according to their studies, the long-term perspective is focusing on enabling automation for choosing and organizing the administration for an Erasmus+ mobility. For further advancing the mobility support in this manner, the choices made by students needs to be carried forward for processing the administrative needs including identification of students using the European Student Identifier as the prerequisite for providing for digital processing of agreements in according with the EWP possibilities. Furthermore, the ESC is presently being planned for roll-out within EUt+. The intention is for the ESC in EUt+ are not to not only offer identification of students on mobility, but to also offer digital services such as library access and access to the Open Educational Resources offer of the alliance.
Goal:
To anchor the possibility of unambigious student identification, the use of the ESI as part of the ESC needs to be planned for inclusion and interfacing with the partners’ student management and mobility management systems.
Work plan:
The work plan is to be operated in parallel to the first use case. Also here, each of the partners needs to provide the applicable specifics of their system within the next two months. The analysis needs to focus to possibilities given already and identification of obstacles for identifying student data for import or export. As need may be, interfaces need to be developed. By February validation and the next steps towards issuing the ESI by all alliance partners is envisioned.
Standards to be used:
The choice of standard is the ESC.