Digital transformation has put Enterprise Architecture (EA) higher up on the agenda. The demands of digital transformation have intensified the need for organizations to have a common framework and vocabulary for understanding their structure and the interrelationship between key organizational components. This paper reports on the work developed by a multidisciplinary team from different European Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to design a program that other HEIs can use to raise awareness of the importance of EA modeling in their organizations to display the impact of changes. The paper describes the program’s goals, the underlying methodology applied, and the insights gathered from two workshops realized in 2022 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), in Norway, to validate the program’s methodology.
EMREX is a solution for transferring student data internationally in a machine- readable way and in a structured format. The EMREX service network has been in production since 2017. ELMO is the data standard used in the EMREX network to describe student achievements and supporting data. One of the strategic goals established for EMREX in 2022 by the Executive Committee of the EMREX User Group was to support one or more wallet solutions. For the EMREX-used data standard ELMO a strategic goal was set to keep ELMO compatible, as far as possible, with other European educational standards: European Learning Model (ELM) and Single Digital Gateway (SDG). The new digital European landscape was shaped by two EU-legislations, bringing into live the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI) and Single Digital Gateway, a platform which facilitates online access to information, administrative procedures, and assistance services that EU citizens and businesses may need in another EU country. To fulfil the established strategic goals, some partners from the EMREX community joined the Digital Credentials for Europe (DC4EU) project, consisting of 80 partners from 23 countries. The aim is to create a working pilot installation of a digital wallet that conforms to the EUDI wallet framework. The participation is expected to add value both to the EMREX-community and other organisations handling or in need of educational data. This paper brings all these initiatives into common perspective.
This paper analyses how a common language and a profound communication strategy enable the development of shared services in a digitisation project. In this paper, we discuss how RIS Synergy utilises international standards, such as persistent identifiers, to synergise CRIS systems across the Austrian research landscape. The project consortium consists of 17 diverse project partners with different requirements, processes, and vocabularies. Therefore, we share lessons learned and challenges, along with best practices for establishing a task force on public relations and communications for community-building and to raise awareness of the project and ensure its long-term nature.
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are being confronted with a growing number of student applications. This is associated with the verification of documents, which in the case of university entrance qualifications is becoming increasingly complex and error- prone in view of the diversifying education system. Various solutions to this problem have already been proposed, but due to technical, organisational, legal, or financial problems, they have not yet found widespread use. Against this background, this article presents an approach that integrates existing methods and services for digital signatures into a national infrastructure for education and connects them to existing information systems in schools to issue digital diplomas and verify them in HEI application processes. The article describes a technical solution and experiences from a proof-of-concept. First recommendations are given, and an outlook illustrates how the upcoming broad field test will be conducted.
Many European Universities emerged since the first call in 2019, up to now 44 of them. These alliances have some specific goals but also share basic ideas like boosting student, teacher and researcher mobility and cooperation or creating and implementing joint study programmes. To fulfil these shared goals and keep the related processes running smoothly in the alliance, a virtual campus is often envisioned as an information system that will bind the partner universities’ information and fill in the gaps where needed. However, building such a system presents a number of challenges on organisational, informational, and technical levels. In this paper, the basic functionalities of virtual campuses are identified, and a set of specific principles for building such a distributed information system is stated. The architecture of such a system is presented using the example of a particular virtual campus, along with the lessons learned in creating it. The topic is complemented with information on the current state of the system and the future work on this virtual campus.
