Universal language for academic description and information exchange Erasmus Project

Project Title

Universal language for academic description and information exchange

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2020

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Recognition, transparency, certification; International cooperation, international relations, development cooperation; Pedagogy and didactics

Project Summary

Curricula in higher education are becoming less and less linear, due to the continuous increase in international mobility, new audiences that need to be integrated and the recognition of non-formal learning. What used to be minor in higher education will become mainstream. Moreover, within the framework of the “European universities” initiatives, complex training structures proposing choices of courses and campuses will require efficient management. Today, universities’ information systems are struggling to manage this complexity in terms of information exchange.

When rethinking pedagogy to put the student at the center of the learning process, a need appeared crucial to us: building the foundations of a standard of “universal description” of academic and education information. Rather than a unified global information system, we will be experimenting the construction of a “pre-standard”, allowing current local information systems (IS) secure and encrypted data exchanges thanks to standardization of data formats and the implementation of inter-IS connector devices. As a result, the local ISs will communicate via a micro-service library in interconnection. This decentralised system allows the metamodelling of curricula (by data ingestion) and thus offers great technical flexibility allowing strong support for diversity and pedagogical evolutions. In this way, information systems will be able to interoperate in a fluid manner with connector networks that ensure redundancy of information in real time. Moreover, the European student card will be usefully used as an identifier, providing students access to their own information (results, courses, etc.) and to academic information from other universities (teaching guide, etc.), from anywhere. When necessary, he will also be able to give controlled access to his information (departure or return from inter-university mobility, the internship company or future recruiter). In addition, our pre-standard is designed to encourage the development of more suitable offers by capitalizing on learning analytics.
In order to encourage open innovation, the “pre-standard”, the developed software components and the related documents will be made public, open source, under an OSI-approved license . This open and decentralized system will allow any other institution to participate in these exchanges, simply by implementing the necessary connectors.

This exploratory project is carried out by the eight partners of the “European University of Technology – EUt+” Alliance. They anticipate the development of their common decentralised infrastructure, mainly to support the numerous student mobility within the Alliance. Considering a unit of learning outcomes rather than a course unit as the basis for modelling, has made it possible to overcome the difficulties in harmonising training elements. This learner-centred concept is more shared and freely includes the diversity of pedagogical practices.

During these three years, the EUt+ Alliance plans to push forward the construction of a “Universal Language of Description and Exchange of Academic Information” through the formalization of the general description of the pedagogical pathway by learning outcomes, the definition of an “ontology” to describe specific pedagogical vocabularies, and the adaptation of pedagogical objects and their modalities. It will develop connectors and microservices as a proof of concept, with as first applications: the exchange of results of students in mobility, the consultation of courses available at a distance and the metamodelling of curricula and their interpretation. This will be developed in a participatory way, using an agile “test driven development” method, coupled with DataOps practices for the data analysis and indicator synthesis part, in order to ensure development as close as possible to the user, who actively participates.
This project will demonstrate how to offer efficient services quickly, based on current information systems, thanks to a common standard, that does not require a common platform or any kind of centralisation.

Our vision is that this demonstration allows us to go further in terms of capacity of exchange and in the number of universities interested. On the one hand, this could prefigure a major European academic standard, open and secured, where the student has control over his data although it is decentralised. On the other hand, the metamodelling of curricula will make it possible to significantly reduce the constraints of all kinds, imposed by current information systems, and thus, to refocus on the personalised choice of a path towards the competencies grid of a diploma. The benefits (direct and indirect) on the fluidity of exchanges, the flexibility of training courses and the ownership of academic data, are numerous, both at the universities’ local level and at the European networks’ and EHEA level.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 445921 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIVERSITE DE TECHNOLOGIE DE TROYES & Country: FR

Project Partners

• TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY DUBLIN
• UNIVERSITATEA TEHNICA CLUJ-NAPOCA
• UNIVERSIDAD POLITECNICA DE CARTAGENA
• HOCHSCHULE DARMSTADT (UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES H-DA)
• TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY OF SOFIA
• RIGAS TEHNISKA UNIVERSITATE
• TECHNOLOGIKO PANEPISTIMIO KYPROU