This issue includes papers presented in the 19th EUNIS congress "ICT role for Next Generation Universities". All included papers were reviewed by EUNIS 2013 Program Committee. ISBN 978-9934-10-433-6 - online
Virtual Campus Hub: Toward a concept for international collaboration in education
Virtual Campus Hub is a European FP7 project, which aims to remove some important IT barriers for international collaboration in education (e.g. joint programs). Examples are seamless access to partners’ learning materials and document sharing environments. To achieve this, Virtual Campus Hub makes use of the European Géant infrastructure, based on national NREN federations interconnected through the inter-federation eduGAIN. To demonstrate the feasibility of the Virtual Campus Hub, a demo portal has been set up, which provides single-sign on access to partners’ applications and which makes use of Surfnet’s group management module Surfteams to manage access for international groups. Partners in Virtual Campus Hub are Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm (KTH), Politecnico di Torino (PoliTo) and Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), as well as the corresponding federations (Surfconext NL, WAYF DK, Swamid SE and IDEM IT).
Always connected, the Umea University campus and city network approach
This paper describes the current network approach at Umea University and how the strategy has changed over the years to meet new challenges. Today, we face two important scenarios that have to be managed within budget limitation and increased user demands. – the rapid growth of mobile devices put pressure on the University Wireless Network, and the Mobile Internet for the PTT´s to deliver accessibility. – the expectation of users, students and staff to be connected all the time and everywhere, on campus, in the city, in cafes and stores, on buses, in airplanes and on trains with enough network performance to use the application they want. Umea University has a large network, connected to Internet via the national university research network Sunet. The university has approx. 25,000 network outlets and 17,000 of them are active, the rest is a reserve for internal moving around. 100 Mbps is standard for a personal workplace but can be upgraded to higher speed for servers and users with high demands. The wireless network has 520 access-points, all scattered sparsely around the campus for maximum coverage. There are three Wlans accessible all over the campus: UmU Wlan – a closed network that can be accessed with your digital university identity, i.e. CAS or AD eduroam – the federated global university network Adm – the federated network from the local community The Umeå city open network (SSID: City of Umea) is only available at the Museum of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture. In 2010, the university and the local community agreed to federate their wireless networks to make Internet available in community premises for students and staff. For the university, the major benefit is that students can access the university network from local libraries, schools and other local facilities around the city. The university has an agreement with Telia, the major PTT, for both mobile telephones and mobile internet. The university has been moving on the road to Office Extension and offers staff to close their landline office telephones and move over to mobile telephony only. This approach builds on access to mobile telephony as the cell phone gradually takes over as the only office telephone extension for staffers. During 2013, the +20-year old university switchboard will be replaced by Lync 2013 which is a further extended approach to telecommunication. Office@365 and GoogleApps adds collaboration tools to the workplace and the concept Unified Communication is now being implemented and has currently 600+ users in the first installation phase.
A PDF based digital signed document format for interoperable institutional structured data integrity
It is widely recognized that information systems constitute a key tool for the overall performance improvement of administrative tasks in academic institutions. However at their genesis lies a latent promise of a paper-less environment that stays most of the time unfulfilled due to the lack of appropriate digital document integrity and accountability mechanisms. Academic institutions are thus most of the time still relying on traditional security trust methods based on paper documents for signing and archiving critical documents. While this method delivers an inefficient, inconvenient and costly workflow, it is still a common method to provide some sort of workable verifiable integrity and accountability that is still considered to be appropriate for the digital data that is being managed by the institutional information systems. Paper based documents have been relying on physical signatures and stamping policies and the physical properties of paper and ink for their integrity and authenticity for a long time. However, the evaluation of a paper document signature or stamp is not a straight forward process. It requires the recipient to have a notarized copy of the signer’s signature or stamp for comparison and requires handwritten signature evaluation training that is often beyond the scope of many office employee training. This can lead to situations where the level of credibility and integrity of paper based document is not adequate and makes the verification process entirely dependent on the administrative staff capacity of recognizing hand written signatures and puts too much trust on physical stamps, some of which are non-locally issued and thus very difficult to authenticate. In critical contexts this clearly is not enough to provide appropriate levels of non-repudiation and integrity for critical documents issued by institutions. Digitally signed structured XML documents provide an interesting solution to this problem. Not only can the validation of the document be fully automatized and its integrity verifiable in real time by the information system, but it can also be implemented in such way that the information contained in such structured documents can be safely and more easily integrated into different information systems without human intervention, thus allowing for substantial cost reduction and leading to faster process work-flows with increased security and data quality. In this paper we propose a PDF based document framework where any signed XML (PDF) document, produced by the institution can be at a later stage directly dematerialized and integrated into any compliant information system in a secure way while maintaining the information integrity and the ability to be self-verifiable. This framework involves the embedding of an encapsulated XAdES signed XML document with the information used on its production as an attachment to a PDF document with an institutional rendering visualization of the signed XML data. The attached XML document and the PDF are both time stamped by an external entity and signed by employees and the issuing institution.
The future of Digital Student Data Portability: the Groningen Declaration
Paper based diplomas are easy to forge and require a noticeable amount of expertise to verify, especially when presented in a different country from the one that produced them. The so-called diploma mills, illegal operations that sell fake degrees, are running rampant at the moment. Moving to fully digital diplomas can prevent these problems. Digital identity technologies can be used for providing controlled access to verifiable information about an individual academic achievement. The Groningen Declaration has become the centre of a world wide effort to join efforts dedicated to the creation of Digital Diploma Deposits, encompassing developments from China through Mexico and Norway through South Africa. At the core of this efforts lays the work of groups like EUNIS's own RS3G (Rome Students Systems and Standards Group), EAIE's DSDP (Digital Student Data Portability), USA National Student Clearing House or TERENA TF-EMC2. The aim of the present paper and the corresponding presentation is to increase awareness in the European University ICT community of the efforts that surround the Declaration, by presenting the achievements of the first year of its existence, like the meeting that took place in April 2013 in Beijing hosted by CHESSIC and the Chinese MoE.
Transforming the students community into a social network
Technology and Innovation are the backbone of the services and solutions provided by SIGMA, based on a highly open source development and deployment platform for J2EE5 certified application servers compliant on a multi-tier and high performance proven open architecture. Internationalization is one of SIGMA’s top priorities, as well. For years SIGMA has established relationships with other European universities consortiums. Lately SIGMA has open new strategic areas of interest such as SaaS, BI, eLearning and Mobile. SIGMA focuses the development and support of two main suites of solutions: VEGA Student Information System and ARGOS Research Information System. Social networking is a phenomenon spread across all layers of society. The university community should be noted for its dynamism and modernity and, therefore, it is logical to think that it is an appropriate setting for the emergence of different groups of people interacting who can make use of social networks for their intercommunication and collaboration. This mobile App, Pizarra, aims to make the most of the university community through the existing information structures and platforms to provide a communication channel for community members that is split from teaching and learning but can extend its use to personal relationships between students and teachers.
Altruism is dead! - The Perfect Storm: BYOD + CLOUD meet MOOCs
Storm clouds are gathering on the horizon! A revolution is under way and will reverberate within the HE community for the rest of this decade and may reshape Universities! So what is this revolution? What we are supporting is transformational change to academic processes but for us there may be a complete reengineering of the supporting business processes. The arrival of portable, permanently internet-connected devices demand new paradigms of engagement between institutions, students and staff. Since the mid-80s, Universities have been improving access to IT-based systems and services to support education and administration. We have been obsessed initially by access ratios (student to PC seats) and then by networks and latterly by Wi-Fi provision. Initially, we were defeated by the seemingly fixed price ($1000) of the hardware and life-time costs. Now a SMART phone/tablet revolution, supported by pervasive 3G/4G networking and affordable contracts, has brought transformation!
Think Mobile: The Experience of a University towards more Complex Services
Among adaptations of existing services, progressive enhancements, (perceived) performances, Mobile First or MultiTouch First and Responsive Design conceptions, without any dogmatism, this is an unpretentious attempt to think Mobile and Desktop at University Pierre & Marie Curie-Sorbonne Universités - viewed from the Front-End side - through three examples of deployment: a new version of an existing Portal solution -uPortal/uMobile 4-, the University Pierre & Marie Curie on iTunes U site and a home made Video Library and their Video Capture Workflow. I will focus on the Context, the Web Context, the historical adoption of software, the Institution, sometimes all this looks like a fine mess, but strangely and with reactivity, things may be done progressively, I will talk about concepts and issues we've encountered at the University Pierre & Marie Curie. There is a French expression « Diable se cache dans les details » literally: “The devil lurks in the details”- in English, the same expression is “Success lies in the details”, so strange, isn't it?
IT Governance Framework and the Strategic Management System: the case of Universitat Jaume I
IT governance is the ability of the organization to guide the design and implementation processes of IT. The liability for this guidance pertains to the Governing Bodies of the institution that should use it as a means of guaranteeing the alignment of IT initiatives with the general business strategy (Van Grembergen, 2004).
The importance of information logistics for successful implementation of EU research projects
In research projects, information logistics is becoming an increasingly important link between all project phases and elements and their stakeholders, the implementation of which is unthinkable without using ICT. The answers to the question 'How important?' are elaborated in the paper, which describes the development of information logistics used in the implementation of the INTREPID project funded by the EU fund IPA intended for investing in knowledge and innovation. The importance of information logistics is supported by information on the complexity of storing documents and data, the extensiveness and complexity of reporting and communication between project stakeholders is analyzed through all project phases: from project idea development and implementation of project activities to project completion. The extensiveness and complexity of reporting defined by the EU rules, procedures and forms additionally indicate the importance of information logistics in successful monitoring and management of research projects. All this leads to the conclusion that information logistics is irreplaceable in all phases of the external and internal project cycle, the efficiency of which would be largely supported by an integrated information system developed and applicable on the level of all EU research projects.
Towards a Core Model for Higher Education IT Management Benchmarking
This study evaluates three European higher education IT benchmarking projects by applying a custom comparison framework that is based on benchmarking literature and IT manager experience. The participating projects are Bencheit (Finland), UCISA (The United Kingdom) and UNIVERSITIC (Spain). EDUCAUSE (The United States of America) is also included as a project outside our geographical focus area due to its size and prominence in North America. Each of these projects is examined to map the data indicators they use and to form a rough description of their benchmarking process. Major components are then discussed to aid in the development of a European-wide higher education IT benchmarking model. We found that the most common data indicators are related to costs, infrastructure, and IT management structure. Notable differences are related to the emphasis of common indicators, such as cost and infrastructure, as well as non-common indicators such as organisational learning and best practices. These differences seem to stem at least partially from the different goals of the projects. The benchmarking processes have less variance than the data indicators. Some projects have more ambitious goals regarding organisational learning than others, which also had an impact on the data indicators. The most common tool to collect data from higher education institutions was to use a web-based form. Data analysis was most often done manually with Excel and often verified in a consistent process. All projects have a yearly cycle, and a yearly report for the participating organisations’ managers was common.
IT security concept documentation in higher education data centers: A template-based approach
Data centers of universities and IT departments of smaller higher education institutions provide dozens of IT services such as email, web hosting, e-learning, and file storage. The number of server machines and appliances that need to be operated often reach three-digit numbers depending on the number of services, users, and high-availability setups. Many services can be used via the Internet to improve usability. As one of the consequences, many servers are subject to Internet-based attacks. Typically, security mechanisms such as firewalls and intrusion prevention systems are used to counter these attacks. However, in practice still a lot of server machines get compromised, e.g., due to vulnerabilities in server software that is not patched fast enough, or due to improper configuration of the software running on these machines. In an ideal world, there would be enough IT personnel to operate all these IT services, and each IT administrator would also be an IT security specialist who knows exactly how to make his or her own servers almost perfectly secure. In reality, however, often a very small IT staff needs to run more servers than can easily be handled, and IT services such as groupware or e-learning systems have become extremely complex regarding their core functionality. Consequently, administrators only have diminishing resources, i.e., time and know-how, to properly secure their IT services. Specialization then typically leads to the foundation of dedicated security teams, such as CERTs (computer emergency response teams) and CSIRTs (computer security incident response teams). While those security teams consist of security experts, their primary problem is a lack of in-depth-knowledge about all those IT services and their specific configuration. In order to facilitate the security team’s efficient handling of, for example, security incidents in an e-learning service, knowledge transfer from the e-learning administrator to the security team about the specific setup must be fostered, and accurate knowledge must be available on-demand, for example, if a security incident happens while the service administrator is on holidays. In theory, each IT service should be properly documented along with all of its operational and security-specific properties, and this documentation should always be kept up-to-date. In reality, most IT administrators have no time to write documentation, dislike this task, and often do not even know what should be documented in a service-specific “IT security concept”. Therefore, many security incidents are handled in a patch-on-demand manner: Once a service has been compromised by an attacker, it is set up again, e.g., from a clean backup, and minimum configuration changes are applied to prevent the same type of attack from being successful again. While this approach is somewhat pragmatic, it obviously cannot be considered as a good and sustainable solution. We present a template-based approach towards the documentation and management of IT security concepts tailored to the demands of real-world IT service operation in higher education institutions. Our documentation template is intended to be filled in easily, provides a uniform document structure across many types of IT services, encourages IT administrators to think about IT security target-oriented, and supplies security teams with the information they require for security incident handling. Its contents are based on security standards and good practices, such as ISO/IEC 27001, ITIL v3, and the “IT base protection catalogues” by the German Federal Office for Information Security. We are working on a web-based management frontend that makes it easy to initially write, update, access, and utilize the security concept documents, which are stored in a repository that also serves as a foundation for an inter-organizational exchange of IT security concepts.
One way to communicate the value of Enterprise Architecture – maturity levels for IT applications
IT Office is accountable for creating value of IT investments and is responsible for reporting the value of the IT application portfolio. The University Management has given the IT Office a mandate to have the strategic responsibility for all the common IT at the university, applications and technology. Among other things the IT Office is supposed to contribute with information over the status of all IT systems, investment plans involving IT and the annual cost for IT in the university’s annual report. This information is also an important input to our corporate strategy for IT and to IT related decisions on maximizing value of investments.
From a Customer Focused to a Customer Centric University IT
This paper presents a journey that Aalto University IT has taken during the past three years. The focus is on customer centricity and on the actions that have been taken transforming Aalto University IT into an IT department that is “close to the customers”. The transformation has included, for example, changes in the structure and the focus of the IT department, building collaboration networks within the university and carrying out a customer collaboration program. Each of the changes is described in this paper, and preliminary conclusions on their effectiveness and efficiency are made. And the journey goes on…
Improving Infrastructure, Service and Knowledge by “Campus Best Practices” Model
This paper summarises the participation of AMRES, the National Research and Education Network (NREN) of Serbia in the GÉANT “Campus Best Practices” (GN3 NA3/T4) task and the experience and the results that have been achieved by AMRES. Four NRENs are contributing: UNINETT (Norway), CSC/Funet (Finland), CESNET (the Czech Republic) and AMRES (Serbia). Of these, Serbia is the only one which faces the problem of poor technological development, the so-called ‘digital divide’ problem. The NRENs that are faced with this problem pay their full attention and spend overall budget on the improvement of their backbone infrastructure and services, and their external NREN connections. Insufficient attention has been focused on understanding and mitigating the problems of discontinuity in the quality of infrastructure, services and the expertise of staff, which generally exists between the NREN backbone and the campus network. The GÉANT “Campus Best Practices” task examines a working model as one possible solution for the problem.
BENCHEIT - Benchmarking Higher Education IT
The BENCHEIT group is one of the official task forces of EUNIS. BENCHEIT is a project group running an annual survey of IT volumes and costs throughout European higher education institutes. BENCHEIT is the first serious European level effort to compare IT costs and volumes throughout European higher education institutes. Our principles are: Low (or no) cost, voluntary work, total openness with the data for all participants, total cooperation across institutes. Universities often compete against each other – but we do not compete in IT. This is the area to help each other!
Opening Pandora's box: implementing a standards-based approach to the management of course information in UK higher education
Course information lies at the heart of university and college business processes and providing information about learning opportunities to existing and prospective students is a fundamental part of delivering the business of higher education. Despite the essential nature of this information, the management of course data remains a complex, and costly, process and evidence suggests that prospective students find it difficult to access reliable information about certain types of provision. Jisc has been working for some time on the development of common data standards to facilitate the exchange and presentation of this type of information (in particular through development of a standard for course advertising known as XCRI-CAP: eXchanging Course Related Information Course Advertising Profile which influenced the European Metadata for Learning Opportunities - Advertising standard). From September 2011 through to March 2013 Jisc funded a sector wide programme, the Course Data Programme: making the most of course information, to support improved management of course information. 93 universities and colleges participated in stage one of the programme to review their readiness for standardising their approach to course information and to develop an implementation plan and 63 of those continued into stage two of the programme to implement their proposals and deliver 'feeds' of course information for external use. This paper looks at the experiences of those institutions in trying to make the most of one of their most important data assets. At a casual glance, the scope of the programme may seem quite limited and strictly technical in nature. The requirement on HE institutions could be stated quite simply as:' The production of a machine readable 'feed' of course information in a standardised format'. This does however mask the considerable distance many universities and colleges needed to travel in order to be able to collate and present their data in this way. The overall intention of the programme was always to expose the wider issues around the management of course information and to offer a standards-based approach as a common way for the sector to move forward. This paper focuses on techniques applied and lessons learned that may be of value to other EUNIS members and highlights open source products and guidance materials that are openly available for others to use.
White Book of Institutional Intelligence: a collaborative effort to increase business intelligence maturity in HIGHER EDUCATION
The “White Book of Institutional Intelligence in Universities” will be the result of a collaborative effort of a cross-functional team uniting more than twenty persons from the Higher Education sector across eight countries, representing several different roles : management, administration, faculty, external government entities, specialized consultants, etc. The goal of the book is to serve as a reference for institutions willing to acquire or evolve the institutional intelligence capability. The book tries to answer the most common questions any institution has to face when approaching institutional intelligence, for example: What is institutional intelligence and why should I care? What are the benefits? What are the risks? How does “success” look like? How should institutional intelligence be organized? Who are the stakeholders? What is their role and required level of involvement? How should the complex informational landscape of a higher education institution be approached? How is maturity in the institutional intelligence area measured? What are its most important aspects? What is the current state of the art? What are the expected short term innovations? What lessons can be learnt from institutions with successful institutional intelligence initiatives? The English version of the book is due in late 2013 and will be freely distributed in electronic form.
Evaluation of the maturity level of BI initiatives in European Higher Education Institutions: initial report from the BI Task Force @EUNIS
Business intelligence (BI) encompasses a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing, sharing and providing access to data to help enterprise users make better business decisions. Nowadays, the value of BI is perceived as more than information dissemination or tactical responses to information requests from individual managers; it is highly linked to achieving organizational goals. Therefore, well-designed and deployed BI initiatives can play an important role in organizations enabling better management, leadership and decision-making, to achieve efficiency and financial benefit.
Amue, created in 1992, is a French shared-services Agency for Universities and other Higher Education and Research Institutions. It is a public consortium partly funded by the French Government and partly by its members. The board of the Agency is directly led by HE institutions through the ‘Conférence des Présidents d’Université’ (CPU: Conference of French University Rectors). Amue intervenes as an advisor for its members and supports them in various fields: governance, management, financial and tax accounting, human resources, students management, research, real estate management, international relations and information systems.
Using Business Intelligence for Designing Study Programs and Aligning Marketing Efforts
Since higher education has become subject to growing competition, universities can’t afford to sit still and wait for applicants anymore. It has become necessary to know what students you have, where they come from and what happens to them after graduation. Universities need these figures both for planning and for marketing purposes. This is a progress report of a national system that collects data about students before, during and after the studies. Data includes line of study, migration patterns, profession, type of employment, line of business, etc. The presentation will show hands-on examples of real questions used and what benefit the answers can bring to study planners and the university’s strategic planning. It also discusses the technical and judicial foundation for the collection and sharing of data.
Building data warehouse in Metropolia University of Applied Sciences
Universities use many different data systems that store data in different databases. To get maximum benefit from this precious data it is necessary to build a data warehouse. In this building project data from different sources is integrated and processed to form that can be easily used in reporting and analyzing. There are two different widespread data warehouse architectures: Inmon’s and Kimball’s. Metropolia started first with Inmon’s architecture. There were many problems and after many years we could not get much useful data to reporting. Later we changed to Kimball’s architecture and got good results with it.
Education of the 21st century – Social Learning with SAP solutions
Education institutions today face huge challenges in order to fulfill the demands of their student ‘customers’ and manage their success. In the 21st century, these key customers are used to communicating and collaborating at any place, and at any time on personal matters, and they expect to manage their academic lifecycle in the same manner. The challenges for the education institutions are to embed these requirements in their initial strategy, and position the technology for availability, execution and operation. SAP Success Factors provides the opportunity to leverage our ‘administration’ focused Student Information System (SIS) called SAP Student Lifecycle Management (SLcM) to a higher level; a ‘Learning Platform’ level. This learning portfolio functionally extends both a best-in-class leading cloud collaboration tool with a world class cloud LMS system. These solutions bring the potential to enable our SIS with both ‘social learning’ capabilities, with E-Learning and Virtual Classroom capabilities. The major driver for SAP development of this integration is the market demand for a cloud-based ‘learning platform’ that enables an education institution to mobilize the student lifecycle with ‘collaboration’ and ‘delivery’ services. In this presentation the diverse components/services of the integration will be discussed and demonstrated by real use cases. The presentation also includes a live demonstration of several components of that ‘Learning Platform’.
Education is a key element in the life of every person. In the recent years we have seen strong growth and development of information technologies, and as a consequence - informatization process in all areas of society. Particular attention is now being paid to mobile technologies, based on the analysis of the market it has been revealed that tablets and smartphones are one of the most promising areas of development in the near future. The paper presents an approach to design of the e-learning systems in terms of diversity of implementation on the side of the client/end user (mobile application, web application and a classic application for PC). To improve the performance of teachers and students the implementation of special units is suggested, such as the module of the analytical statistics for teachers, the module of additional advanced checking of home work and feedback module.
E-Learning –Challenges of the Next Phase
In our presentation at EUNIS 2013 we want to share our views and reflections on e-Learning perspectives in Higher Education from the point of view of practitioners in a European non‐elite university. As inner-University consultants we are mediating and translating e‐Learning concepts, strategies and technologies to the everyday needs of teachers and students. Our statements reflect the views and experiences of different generations of e-Learning experts: Steffi Engert is about to end her career, which covers twenty years of conceptional and practical work in Higher Education, SMEs and non‐profits. Sandrina Heinrich has recently earned her diploma and transited from supporting students as a student assistant to working full‐time as an academic consultant for learning technologies. Anke Petschenka represents „the middle“: she is representative of (e-Learning) age, when the first wave of early adopters was followed by the first extension of the user base amongst teachers and students. We see e‐Learning in Higher Education at a crossroad amidst a new wave of development. The time of „idealist“ experiments of pioneers of the first and second waves – the first looking for the „virtual university“ (ideally world-wide) and the optimal technical learning environment, the second committed to merging technology and didactics in an intelligent manner – are definitely over. E-Learning is no longer disputed, but has turned into an everyday feature of teaching and learning, albeit still too often on the basic level of electronic distribution of learning materials. In turning into a matter of course, it no longer has to justify its raison d’etre, but instead it has to live up to the real world demands of the mass‐university. It has to prove its worth in helping the universities to cope with the growing number of students and their increasing diversity, undermining traditional models of learning and teaching, under conditions of massive pressures to be cost‐effective and part of the global competition.
Technology and Innovation are the backbone of the services and solutions provided by SIGMA, based on a highly open source development and deployment platform for J2EE5 certified application servers compliant on a multi-tier and high performance proven open architecture. Internationalization is one of SIGMA’s top priorities, as well. For years SIGMA has established relationships with other European universities consortiums. Lately SIGMA has open new strategic areas of interest such as SaaS, BI, eLearning and Mobile. SIGMA focuses the development and support of two main suites of solutions VEGA Student Information System and ARGOS Research Information System. “LMS paradigm, as it has evolved, falls short in three important ways: 1. the organization of learning experiences into discrete, artificially time-bound units, 2. the predominance of instructor-focused and content-centric tools in the CMS,and 3. the lack of persistent connections between learners, instructors, content, and the broader community across semesters and across class, program, and institutional boundaries.” We find the “open learning network” (or OLN) as an alternative to traditional LMS, (Mott & Wiley 2009). With this approach in mind, SIGMA and UAB have started a project to lightly integrate VEGA Student Information System, FDPMS Final Degree Project Management System, WCMS Work- contract / Internship-contract Management System with the UAB LMS, Portfolio and internal and external MOOC experiences of UAB students.
Harnessing the power of Office 365 to provide a social learning environment through a new Student Portal
The University of West London (UWL) has harnessed the potential of a Cloud-based suite of collaboration tools (Microsoft Office 365, offered free of charge to higher education institutions) to create a personalised, interactive, social platform to both improve the learning experience and to enable students to combine social learning with their academic study. UWL describes how it engaged with its students to design and refine the requirements for a new student portal, outsourced the development of hosted SharePoint, and delivered an award-winning solution1 in just 5 weeks.
With over 73,000 registered instances worldwide, Moodle has already become one of the most popular Learning Management Systems, used by a variety of educational institutions from 224 different countries across the globe. Teachers appreciate its ease of use and a wide range of built-in tools, which allow them to deliver various forms of e-learning content to students and test their knowledge in many different ways. On the other hand, the system administrators and programmers make use of its open license, which allows them to develop their own system plugins and integrate it with the third party educational systems, like Mahara e-portfolio or Big Blue Button videoconferencing tool. The scope of Moodle popularity causes that currently most of the teachers are engaged in more than a single online course and provide their educational materials to many different student groups. Moreover, some of these courses are very often distributed between multiple Moodle instances, which additionally could be managed by different schools or universities. As a result, when the teachers want to publish the same material for different student groups, e.g. a single .pdf, .doc, .ppt, image, audio or video file, they must upload individual copies of these files to every Moodle platform they are using. Furthermore, when they need to update the previously uploaded materials, they have to edit them on every single course of each platform. Depending on the number of courses and e-learning content being used, this could be the cause of many arduous administrating tasks repeated frequently by the teachers.
"ICT’s role in Next Generation Universities: What will IT look like in a New Campus?"
The University of Ulster, one of two in Northern Ireland and of seven on the island of Ireland has a student population of some 26,000 with 4 campuses (Belfast, Jordanstown, Coleraine and Magee) dispersed throughout the county. It has created an ambitious estates development strategy that includes the development of a new urban campus in Belfast city centre, the capital city, with the initial phase due occupancy in 2015 and the complete campus by October 2018. The decision to develop the new campus, which will eventually be home to 15,000 students, was taken following a Government commissioned review, in 2006, of the higher education estate in Northern Ireland. A review by the University considered various options to redress the situation, with the most cost-effective option being to relocate around 13,000 students from its Jordanstown campus to a new city centre development.The new campus will play a significant role in the academic, cultural, social and economic regeneration of the city of Belfast and will be co-located and integrated with its existing modern campus where approximately 1,800 students currently study.
Supporting assessment and feedback practice with technology: a view of the UK landscape
Assessment and feedback lies at the heart of the learning experience, and forms a significant part of both academic and administrative workload. In the UK however it remains the single biggest source of student dissatisfaction with the higher education experience. Most providers of higher education are seeking to enhance their approaches to assessment and feedback to better meet learner needs and expectations and are having to do so in the face of increasing resource constraints. The Jisc Assessment and Feedback programme (Sept 2011-Aug 2014) is supporting large-scale changes in assessment and feedback practice, supported by technology, with the aim of enhancing the learning and teaching process and delivering efficiencies and quality improvements. This paper looks at some of the emerging outcomes of this work. It reviews the assessment and feedback landscape at the start of the programme, highlights some of the most significant issues and looks at the ways in which technology is being applied to enhance practice in each of these areas. In particular the paper highlights some open source tools and other resources that are readily available for use by other EUNIS members.
Our students and researchers arrive nowadays at the university with a broad knowledge and expectations about the IT support and the IT technology. Notebooks, netbooks, smart phones together with a broad WiFi coverage enable a nearly unlimited freedom regarding information acquisition, selection, and processing regardless of the current working environment and the time of the day. A broad selection of available applications for smart phones removes even the necessity to be in a specific area in order to approach and use the services. Schools, colleges, and universities must adapt to the expectations of these digital natives and offer their services in a similar way. They must see the user as a customer in the middle of all processes and allow a maximum possible increase of efficiency in order to fulfill the complex requirements in study and research. However, university such as TU Berlin is not comparable to a commercial provider of certain services, e.g. with a provider of flight tickets. The university unifies manifold services such as study, research, management, projects, patents, cooperation and many more. It also hosts different groups of users having different contexts and needs for services. The integrated service provision is to recognize the current user context, to identify the need, and to provide reliable access to the selected services regardless of the current working environment. In this paper, the path of the TU Berlin towards integrated service provision is described.
University Information Systems and the need for strong authentication and authorisation
Corporate academic Information Systems have faced, in the last years, a growing need for meeting high demanding standards for interoperability, transparency, open access, enhancement of learning and research IT infrastructures and applications, cross-border data exchange, etc. All these aspects of IT allow adding an unquestionable value to university information systems. They are not any more internal and isolated systems managed by a few computer experts and used by a limited number of people in the academic community, but open and accessible tools that a wide variety of users may access.
Event Driven Identity Management Systems
Businesses typically have several services where employees may log in using some centrally provided credential(s). However, those credentials are usually system specific and stored separately in different records - one for each system. When one of the attributes (e.g. name or title) common to some credentials changes, it should be updated everywhere to match. Doing this in batch mode e.g. once a day has at least the following drawbacks: ● Creates delay (credentials are out of sync until batch is run) ● Unnecessary processing of identities that didn't change ● High system load while identities are being synchronized Event driven identity management trades all these flaws to increased complexity. In Helsinki Metropolia University of Applied Sciences such system, an in-house developed software named Amme (translates literally into "basin, tub"), is being used. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the software architecture and behaviour of Amme as an example of an event driven identity management system. This paper also studies other parts of IAM (Identity and Access Management) architecture and support processes in Metropolia e.g. software systems where identity information is originated, directories where data is populated, custom interfaces for software systems and single-sign-on - architecture.
SSEDIC second year: presenting results relevant to universities
SSEDIC (Scoping a Single Electronic Identity Community) has entered its third year helping the European Commission (EC) to create a common view of the electronic identity landscape as input for the 2020 Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE). The results from the second year of work have recently been reviewed by the EC and published in the SSEDIC web site (http://www.eid-ssedic.eu/). Although there are seven published documents this year, we would like to focus on three of them that are of higher relevance to Universities: results of the second SSEDIC eID survey (which has got a significant level of input from the Higher Education community), the Authentication Standards Paper and, specially, the document on eID in universities. The main aim of the presentation is raising awareness of these materials among the University IT community. This second year work has used the input from the first year review, presented at last year's EUNIS congress in Vila Real, and its review results will be the stepping stone to the last year of work. We would like to have the views of the University IT community in order to improve SSEDIC knowledge of electronic identity in Higher Education and thus provide a better input to the DAE.
Each university engages in supporting its processes with ICT solutions. The decision about the choice and variety of the ICT is based on the history, the competence and the competitiveness of the university. This paper describes the core information systems (IS) in Riga Technical University, particularly, the university portal ORTUS that facilitates the access and the use of existing and new core information systems aimed to support the study, science and administrative processes. The way of organizing and integrating systems through ORTUS influences usage and overall acceptance of the provided services.
Student management with HISinOne – A status report
The latest software generation by the German IT company HIS is named HISinOne. HISinOne is a centralized integrated web-browser based application with various functions supporting the student lifecycle in HEIs. The University Duisburg-Essen (UDE) is one of the early adopters of this new software generation. In Q4/2012, the modules for student (STU) and student fee (FIA) administration have been rolled out successfully, running in an integrated IT-system, together with the exam management (EXA) and application (APP) module. This paper reports about the technological experiences made.
Designing a Large Scale Cooperative Sync&Share Cloud Storage Plattform for the Academic Community in Northrhine-Westfalia
Cloud storage services allowing to synchronize file folders on multiple devices and to exchange data between users for collaboration are gaining substantial public recognition lately, due to the proliferation of mobile and personal devices like smartphones and tablets. Utilization of such services, either free or paid, like Dropbox, GoogleDrive, or Microsoft SkyDrive, in the academic community is not uncommon, even for storing sensible data from research and teaching. This creates substantial data privacy and confidentiality issues, even putting the individual user at legal risk (cf. Catteddu et al. 2009; Hoboken et al. 2012). Guidelines for usage considerations for public cloud services, as have been imposed by several universities in Germany, try to create awareness among scholars, and in some cases, data security officers even officially ban the use of public cloud storage services.
CLOUDS BASED TECHNOLOGICAL BUSINESS ENGINEERING
Nowadays there are various views on the future of business architecture. On the one hand, it’s getting strongly influenced by IT: information flows are growing rapidly and walls between the departments or even sub-companies are dissolving or at least start to fade. On the other hand, business architecture incumbents are not often ready for quick e-transformations due to their silos: inner friction, employees and “as-is” processes. The scope of the new range of architecture seems to be an interdisciplinary combination of the approaches and is getting out of concept layer. In this study an analysis of co-adoption of several modern concepts of the new enterprise architecture creation- real-time business processes generation on the global cloud-based self-generated business service basis is provided. The feedback loop makes business processes as visible for corrections as locally efficient. The architecture itself takes the responsibility for the global efficiency and strategy goals achievement. The main obstacle for such business development or reengineering on a platform of basic or referential patterns is a ‘human factor’, which is a key issue in resource usage for such processes.
UnivCloud Project - An innovative concept of a privative Cloud Community
Paris Île-de-France Digital University (UNPIdF) was created in 2006 following the 2003 call for proposals on regional digital universities. It is attached to the University of Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne, and potentially represents over 500,000 students (25% of French students) and around 50,000 academic and administrative staff (about a third of national staff). The objectives of the UnivCloud project are to define a shared Cloud community platform for the public sphere, to ensure effective management of IT security and system dependability, to analyze uses in order to provide decision support for the infrastructure's everyday running and capacity management, to offer collaborative, shared tools for use by several institutions and to optimize the resources required for the system’s operation (energy, IT equipment, etc.) The project team will present each stage of the project in detail, including its deliverables, the difficulties it presents in terms of organization and skills, a brief comparison to similar approaches in other European countries and the latest results achieved by the Demonstrator. UnivCloud project is contributing to the development of a competitive Cloud computing solution equal to the challenge of managing computing and data infrastructure within France's Higher Education system.
Cloud Service Delivery Across the R&E Community - Opportunities and Risks
Cloud computing, and cloud services in particular, offer the Research and Education sector huge opportunities to both maximise effectiveness and reduce the capital investment and development time to deliver results. By utilising shared and off-the-shelf services for commodity activities, the R&E community can refocus its design, development and support resources into those fields that cannot be easily provided by the commercial sector. Cloud computing empowers users to select and use the services they really want, in an easy and often economically attractive manner. The broad standardisation of service delivery offers substantial advantages with scalability and user acceptance. By using services that the users have had experience of outside the R&E community, training requirements can be minimised and personal efficiency can be improved. The scalability of cloud services also allows rapid expansion or contraction of capacity as the project requires with minimal penalties. This near-linear cost model allows easier budgeting and financial control.
Data storage architecture to support various research needs and data lifecycle management
IT architecture and life cycle management is essential when cost-efficient solutions are developed for research data management. The IT center of the University of Helsinki (UH) has an ongoing project to find suitable services for varying needs to handle research data and offer services to researchers with storage needs. Several findings and suggestions have been made during the project.
Bootstrapping OAuth for mobile apps using QR codes
The current trend to do as many things as possible using mobile devices prompted the University of Málaga Central ICT Services to plan the development of mobile apps that would allow access to student data stored in the student management systems. Allowing access to personal data required strong authentication of the users and a secure way of storing credentials in otherwise insecure devices. Most mobile devices used by the student population have cameras that can scan QR codes and act on them. So, inserting a QR scan in the application installation process was an easy way to go. The initial application is able to send alerts to the registered handsets and allow for reviewing published exams results. The app got over two thousand registered devices in five days.
FS3 Framework SIGMA 3 – A complete framework & toolkit for J2EE applications development
Since 1998 SIGMA opted for development in Java, creating its own framework on which to run its business logic. Since then, SIGMA has refined and updated the framework to the latest technologies, now providing the third generation of its suite of tools, called FS3 Framework SIGMA 3, an enterprise class middleware suite of integrated features that allows developers to build high quality business applications in a short period of time. Technology and Innovation are the backbone of the services and solutions provided, based on a highly open source development and deployment platform for J2EE5 certified application servers compliant on a multi-tier and high performance proven open architecture. Internationalization is one of SIGMA’s top priorities, as well. For years SIGMA has established relationships with other European universities consortiums. Lately SIGMA has open new strategic areas of interest such as SaaS, BI, eLearning and Mobile. SIGMA focuses the development and support of two main suites of solutions VEGA Student Information System and ARGOS Research Information System. FS3 Framework SIGMA 3 – A complete framework & toolkit for J2EE applications development SIGMA is engaged in the development of management applications for academic life cycle, teaching and research for users of university faculties and departments, and services for teachers and students. Since 1998 SIGMA opted for development in Java, creating its own framework on which to run its business logic. Since then, SIGMA has refined and updated the framework to the latest technologies, now providing the third generation of its suite of tools, called FS3 Framework SIGMA 3, an enterprise class middleware suite of integrated features that allows developers to build high quality business applications in a short period of time. The framework is designed to create web applications for a three-tier architecture (web server, J2EE application server and JDBC connectivity to database). FS3 consists of four elements, the SDK itself, a service control package for security, user access management, traceability, a SOA bus to connect web services and a set of high-level tools to complete the typical needs of a multi-user application such as planning processes, data extraction, graphical report, system and applications logs analysis and so on. Deploy FS3 applications on a cloud environment allow SIGMA to offer those applications in a SaaS model. The framework makes it possible that administrating just one production environment for the application server the same application is able to run once for multiple customers, making the administration tasks easier and reducing costs.
Framework for rapid in-house development of web applications for higher education institutions in Poland
1. ABSTRACT USOS [2] is a student management information system developed in-house for higher education institutions (HEIs) in Poland, from the MUCI consortium. It consists of a desktop application developed in Oracle technology for the university administration, and a suite of web based applications, for handling admission, course registration, grades, student diploma theses, social aid, course surveys and many other services, dedicated for students and university teachers. They were developed in the last ten years in such technologies as PHP, Smarty, JavaScript and Ajax. Recently the system designers decided to rewrite some of them from scratch. They chose Django as the framework for the new software. While designing the software architecture they recognized functionalities which might be shared among various applications and decided to gather them in a separate framework on which some of the future web applications for USOS might be based. In such a way Django USOS framework was born. This framework may be used not only by the team of USOS developers but also by programmers developing local applications for the universities from the consortium, either in-house or with the help of independent suppliers.
There is a growing awareness among the institutions of Higher Education (HE) in the Netherlands that the use of cloud computing could help solve the problems arising from diminishing budgets. Focusing on core business while transferring (parts of) the institutional IT to the cloud could reduce costs and also increase both flexibility and quality. Moving to the cloud, however, is not without risk. Success is not guaranteed. If an institution is not “cloud-ready”, a cloud adventure could turn into a failure and bring disadvantages. Changing to information services from the cloud is actually a sourcing decision. What institutions really need is a mature sourcing process. SURF, the collaboration organisation of Dutch HE, is helping the institutions to make the transition to cloud services. In 2011 a “Cloud First” IT strategy was developed, which received strong support. In 2012 SURF developed a template and organized workshops to help CIOs and IT directors to formulate an institutional sourcing strategy. Commissioned by SURF, Amsterdam University published a study on the relation between the Patriot Act and Dutch and European Privacy Laws. In collaboration with CIOs and architects from the institutions a common I-strategy for Dutch HE is under development. This project will also produce common architecture principles and a generic reference architecture. And finally there is a growing interest in “cloud readiness”.
LEARNING SPACES AND STUDENTS’ ENTREPRENEURSHIP: THE STRATEGY FOR THE SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION OF AN E-LEARNING CAFÉ IN CAMPUS U. PORTO
Universities are facing demanding challenges due to the rising of life-long-learning needs and the responsibility to accommodate new and emerging technologies in the learning process. On the European Higher Education Area “learning” takes a primordial limelight. Also, in a globalized society where information and communication technologies play a major role, employers require higher education graduates not only to be excellent in communication and in the use of information, but also to think creatively, to be able to innovate, cooperate and compete across borders. The spatial configuration of learning spaces and the facilities and initiatives they accommodate are rather important to provide effective environments for learning, where diverse studying and cultural activities combine, motivating students to become more knowledgeable and equipped with the interdisciplinary and high level skills the 21st century society requires. The main objective of this work is to present and discuss the contribution of the e-Learning Café project of the University of Porto and of the successful implementation of its program, focused on diverse pedagogical and cultural activities, to the acquisition of students’ attitudes and skills essential to handle professional relationships and to facilitate learning, personal development and entrepreneurship.
USE OF THE E-PORTFOLIO IN THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS
E-portfolio is a learning tool that is recognized as valuable in enhancement of the quality of teaching and learning and orientation towards student-centred learning. It can be used for various purposes in education, from storing learners’ work, recording achievements, as assessment of and for learning, as a means for monitoring learners’ progress, for presentation and marketing purposes or for mobility between educational institutions. E-portfolio has been present for more than a decade and its benefits in education were immediately recognized with predictions for prominent future. But today, it is still being rediscovered, explained and introduced despite some really good examples of use. The University of Zagreb started with the process of e-portfolio implementation in 2008 by establishing the university e-portfolio system and providing support to users. In 2012, this process was fostered with the project “Use of the e-portfolio system in the educational process” in cooperation with the University of Porto, Portugal. The presentation will summarise opportunities of using e-portfolio in higher education with emphasis on the e-portfolio as a learning activity. Also, an overview will be given on the e-portfolio implementation process at the University of Zagreb.
In accordance with The Danish eGOVERNMENT strategy 2011-2015 digital assessment and exam should be implemented at all Danish universities by the end of 2013. University of Southern Denmark (SDU) decided to start the implementation in May 2010. By the exam term of January 2013, the implementation proved successful, and close to completion. The majority of assessments at all of the 5 faculties and 5 campuses were digital, and students had handed in a total of 17.021 digital assessments. On the basis of a conscious approach to active learning and activating teaching as well as E-learning, SDU has implemented digital assessments. There are many models in use at SDU, but since there is not just one model and one way to assess students a broad selection of IT-tools has been developed: multiple choice questionnaire (MCQ-test), e-Portfolios2, exam with internet access, exam with some internet access.
MOOC: a revolution in teaching? A European view
Since the end of the 90’s and the emergence of widely disseminated technologies, Information Technology has been claimed as a strong means to revolutionize the old way of teaching and learning. American universities have focused on new technologies and their use for education since their appearance in the late 90s. With the explosion of the Web technologies, the dream of a full distance education has started to be a reality. The intention of the universities was twofold: to attract new customers far from their traditional recruitment pools and to compete not only with other universities, but also with private companies, such as Phoenix U., which organized classical distance learning with great success. The creation of WGU, a pure online university (WGU 1995) is the best example of this intention. Later, the MIT created the Open Courseware initiative (OCW 2002) which exposes an increasing number of teaching documents to the world. In 2006, the Khan academy (Khan 2006), not especially intended towards Higher Education, invited everyone to add their own short video (less than 10 minutes in most cases) to explain any point of interest. The contributors are all volunteers. Neither their qualifications nor their legitimacy are controlled. More recently, a new concept, MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) presented a more ambitious goal. Its aim was to provide a comprehensive education to any public, at world scale, and to deliver an attestation (certification) of completion of study to those who had followed successfully the full course. However one must define what the word “successfully” means. The concept of distance learning is quite old. It has been evolving with the technology and the economic conditions. Are the MOOC a breakthrought in education or a new avatar of an old concept? An excellent review about this issue has been made by Hill (2012). MOOC promoters distinguish two kinds of MOOC (Tracey 2013): xMOOC which is the extension and adaptation of the classical way of knowledge transmission, adapted to a massive number of apprentices and the connectivist MOOC,c-MOOC, which expects a more active learner. The student is supposed to discuss, to debate and to share his/her knowledge with his fellow learners. He is also encouraged to discover teaching materials in the immensity of the web. Before further discussing the MOOC, it is necessary to explain what kind of pedagogy is characteristic of the socio-economic context of the American universities, to understand to which problem this new concept is supposed to answer.
The Data Portal of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the German Open Government Approach
A German online data portal containing tables with statistical data material was launched in early summer 2011. This is offered by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and implemented by the HIS Higher Education Research Institute. The portal is intended as an information system for research support as well as a data source for ministries, press, businesses and interested private citizens. It offers a wide range of data in the fields of education, research and innovation. The portal covers, amongst others, partially very long time series from the paper based publication „Federal Report on Research and Innovation“ and the former paper series „Basic and Structural Data“. It comprises more than 400 tables from different sources (e.g. Federal Statistical Office, European Union, OECD, Centre for European Economic Research, HIS Higher Education Information System, Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training). The data portal is regularly updated, namely, several times a year, as soon as recent data is available from any source.
Project Albúmina: preserving photographic memories
The present work presents a joint proposal from University of Málaga Image Technology Centre (CTI) and Central ICT Service (SCI), to create a digital photographic archive for the former. Such archive will contribute to the preservation of valuable memories supported on photographies by allowing easier access to the wider society. The University of Málaga Image Technology Centre (CTI-UMA) is an audio-visual producing facility aimed at photo and video-graphic and multimedia production. The photographic archive has half a million photographs, both from historic collections from the late nineteenth century and the 1980's and from the service daily work. The project aim was to facilitate the creation of a standards based electronic archive of the digital version of the originals and, at the same time, allowing for an easy creation of on-line exhibitions based on web quality versions of the original images, catering both to researchers and professionals and to the general public. The archive was supposed to be at the same time scalable and affordable. Any code used or produced for the project had to be open source, so other institutions could easily make use of our work for their photographic archives. The results are encouraging, as the project, in its present status, has allowed for the classification of over fifty thousand originals, increasing the productivity of the archival team fivefold, and the creation of three virtual exhibits, with their physical counterparts.
Innovative OpenSource Technologies for a CRIS: SURplus, a CINECA’s solution
SURplus is the CINECA’s best-of-breed solution for a CRIS, Current Research Information System. It is an IT platform that makes it easy to collect and manage data on research activities and outputs within an organization. Researchers, administrators and evaluators are given all the tools needed to monitor research results, enhance visibility and efficiently allocate available resources One of the strengths of SURplus is that it sets new trends for IT support to CRIS, proposing and adopting innovative solutions to meet research need for governance. The decision to develop the solution on several open-source standards confirms this attitude. This paper describes the use of three solutions applied to different modules of SURplus CRIS platform.
Opening data in Higher Education Institution - Metropolia's story
Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are producing a vast amount of information about education arrangements. At the moment that information is available only to those who have access to the information resources. HEIs are resourcing their efforts to create different systems where HEIs employees and students can retrieve information for their needs. Can the HEI's IT management keep up the pace of creating innovative, easy to use interfaces and support for different clients and platforms against the products of large corporations? Is the race really necessary or is there another solution? Yes there is. In Finland the public transport operator decided a few years ago to open all their traffic data. Of course they built their own system for customers to show different timetables of public transport. But their goal was more far reaching. Immediately after the opening of the data many individuals started to build their own timetable applications. One of the applications was for iPhone, another for Android. New apps were more innovative and simpler to use than the initial service provided by the public transport corporation. Open data created new markets, created innovative products and customers of public transport were more satisfied with public transport services. Is there a lesson to be learned also by Higher Education Institutions? Yes of course!
Unattended lecture recording: the VIDEOAPUNTES project
Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV) has developed a pilot program for automated recording of lectures called Videoapuntes during the academic year of 2012-2013. In this project we have recorded up to 36 lecture halls, from which students in the pilot courses have access to a high quality recording of the lecture comprising audio, video and the screen from the computer used by the teacher. Students access this content through the virtual campus platform. This recording has been made using the technology developed by the Opencast international consortium, in which UPV is an active member. Results from this pilot have been very successful, both in terms of quality and the number of recordings and in terms of student feedback, with more than 85% of the students valuating this resource as helpful or very helpful. In this paper we will present the plan, the technology that we are using, and the results we have obtained from the student feedback.
Repository Platform for Motivating Education
Despite market demand, there is a lack of university graduates, especially in Information Systems (IS) (Granger et al., 2007). To attract both prospective and first-year students to pursue an academic education, universities have to provide a motivating study environment. A recent study reports a dropout rate of 35% for German university Bachelor programs and identifies lack of motivation as one of the main reasons (Heublein et al., 2010). To investigate the effect of showing the practical relevance of theoretical knowledge to students we provided a one-day lab with a fictitious but realistic use-case at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Caporale et al., 2013a). The general lab setting focused on Business Process Management (BPM) and students got the objective to model and improve the business processes of a fictitious company. As the evaluation of the lab showed, many students perceived the lab as a factor contributing to a better understanding of the connection between practical and theoretical aspects of BPM. To extend the lab we propose an integrated teaching concept which does not only consider theoretical foundations as defined in the curriculum (Learn), but also embraces the fields of science (Research) and professional practice (Apply) (Caporale et al., 2013b). To this avail, the fictitious company setting was developed further to provide a generic framework to derive appropriate use cases in order to enable a problem-oriented and holistic learning approach. This way, students directly experience the relevance and applicability of theoretical knowledge which in turn raises motivation. The paradigm shift towards student-centered learning documented in the trend report prepared for the UNESCO 2009 World Conference on Higher Education by Altbach et al. (2009) emphasizes the need to involve students actively in the learning process. According to the authors, there is a trend towards imparting functional knowledge (e.g. the knowledge how to apply theory to practical situations) rather than solely teaching declarative knowledge which has to be memorized and regurgitated. This philosophy is exactly in line with our concept. We are currently developing a platform to support the modeling and instantiation of modern university courses according to our concept. Essential part of this platform is a repository layer, which includes three main repositories: (i) a service repository, which offers functionality for collaboration and communication between participants as well as other course-supporting software like document management; (ii) a course administration repository, which provides general course management tools like course evaluation and user subscriptions and (iii) a didactic repository, which is the most important part as it contains didactical and methodical components as well as an examination toolbox, the fictitious company and the learning content itself. The four components (method, exam, learning content and use case) can be combined to learning items which are also stored in the didactic repository. Above the repository layer, there is the course layer that contains the course modeler. With the help of the course modeler, lecturers can combine and orchestrate the desired repository elements from the repository layer to generate a course instance. Based on the platform integration, the selected elements can be evaluated during each instantiation to allow cyclic and continuous improvement. As technical foundation the platform has a data layer, which consists of a database and a file server. Additionally a platform administration layer includes access control, user management and repository management features.
U-GOV Portal: The University Portal as the access point to the services for the University community
With their rapid development, digital technologies have transformed systems within Higher Education, redefining its reference standards and models. Today a modern university interacts with its users through digital media, makes available online all the key information for presenting the institution’s profile and the offer and provides access to the online services profiled based on the characteristics of each user in multichannel mode. For this reason the new technologies and service innovation have been the main focus of interest and investments of universities.
The UCISA Community and its achievements: UK good practice resources
UCISA, the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association, is a membership organisation representing those responsible for delivering information management systems and technology services in universities, colleges and other institutions. UCISA membership is institutional and has almost 100% coverage within the higher education sector in the UK. UCISA also has over 90 corporate members. UCISA's aims are to promote best practice through events, awards, and publications, and to represent the interests of its members through lobbying, responding to consultations, and building relationships with other groups (typically through UCISA’s active involvement in committees and working parties). The poster showcases the achievements of the UCISA community, with particular attention to the resources produced by UCISA’s specialist interest groups and communities of practice. Recent examples include: an information security toolkit which 15 universities have used to derive policies from; a briefing paper on cloud computing aimed at non-technical senior managers; an ITIL readiness assessment tool; a guide for engaging with academics in the use of technology enhanced learning and case studies on the provision of wireless access. UCISA publications, case studies and event materials (presentations, streamed content and other post–event resources) are freely available to colleagues across the UK and internationally at www.ucisa.ac.uk
Business Intelligence (BI) Task Force @EUNIS
This poster presentation is to introduce both the initial objectives and activities of the new EUNIS Task Force group about the application of Business Intelligence (BI) in European Higher Education Institutions (HEI), BITF@EUNIS. Founded during the 2011 EUNIS Congress in Dublin, notable activities started as a result of a “Birds of a Feather” meeting held in Vila Real (Portugal) during the 2012 EUNIS Congress, when a group of about 19 BI enthusiasts from 9 European countries gathered to identify common topics of interest for a BI Task Force. Currently, the active members of the BI Task Force (BITF) include people from the University of Osnabrueck (Germany), the University Institute of Lisbon (Portugal), the Italian consortia AlmaLaurea and CINECA, and the Spanish Office for University Cooperation (OCU). As a starting point for further services, this core team initiated the first BITF-project to survey the occurrence and maturity of BI applications across European HEIs. Details of this survey are subject to another paper submission to EUNIS-2013. To summarize, it aims for a continuously updated collection of maturity information, enabling participants to perform a self-assessment and benchmark of its BI maturity level against other HEI, both actually and over time. Thus, it is to deliver the first cornerstone for the overall goals of the BI Task Force @EUNIS, namely, to promote the creation of a European platform to exchange and share knowledge and experiences on BI in HE institutions. Aside the maturity survey data, which of course are to be organized, processed and presented by typical BI technologies, the "BITF knowledge base" might collect and disseminate examples of BI application components or case studies as reference, e.g. data models, definitions of key measures or dimension hierarchies for analyses, or dashboard designs. Furthermore, guidelines for BI project and runtime organization are conceivable. These are just proposals for contents, which are to be defined and committed by BITF participants, next to be continued during the EUNIS 2013 conference. However, the BITF will not itself fill in the contents, in fact, it defines its responsibility only in developing and facilitating an online platform for the exchange of experiences in the sense of traditional knowledge management systems. Therefore, the directions and success are determined by its intended users, i.e. European HE institutions. With this poster, the authors want to inform about this project and invite EUNIS members for active participation in the BITF initiative.
A NEW MODEL FOR INTEGRATING SERVICES, INFORMATION AND PEOPLE: U‑GOV INTEGRATION, DISSEMINATION & COLLABORATION
U-GOV Integration, Dissemination & Collaboration is a solution to connect people to data and services. It brings into the higher education institutions an innovative model of integrated work and a generation of completely new services that help making interactions more efficient and flexible. It has three main aspects: Identity and Service Management, Business Process Management and Integrated & Collaborative Services.
Unique IDM solutions at Lappeenranta University of Technology
Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) is a dynamic, agile university setting special requirements for its Identity Management. We have developed unique solutions that have proven cost effective and time saving for our university and I believe would do so for other organizations as well. At LUT we started implementing an IDM solution back in 2003 to meet the need for accurate login data across multiple systems. Since then we have ruled standard IDM solution models to be too inefficient for dynamic organization environments such as ours since it leaves lots of manual effort, coding and administration work in order to keep up with the environment. From IDM point of view, LUT environment is a rapidly changing one with almost annually changing multiple identity sources, variable data syntaxes, new connected systems and constantly living organizational structures. These changes cannot be handled well with standard IDM implementation models.
Academic Video in the Portuguese High Education Network: the EDUCast@fccn project
Since 2010 it was developed an innovative partnership initiated by the Portuguese Foundation for National Scientific Computing (FCCN), by SWITCH (the institution that manages the Swiss Network Technology Research and Education) and the University of Porto (U.Porto). These three European institutions have developed a work of exploration and discussion under the auspices of TERENA (Trans-European Research and Education Networking) during the various forums for collaboration, innovation and knowledge sharing that this institution regularly promotes. Thus, was born in Portugal the project Educast@fccn that can be considered the simplest national service to manage educational video from recording to the distribution process. This service is based on a technology platform for production, editing and video distribution that allows full autonomy to the user in all the process. In addition to the innovative technology, this service provides to all High Education Institutions (HEI’s), in Portugal, the integration into a professional structure that supports the production of audiovisual content for e-learning and blended learning in each institution and a great possibility of scaling the production on each one of the institutions. The specific logistics of each HEI in Portugal and the specific teaching of each academic community are some of the major challenges faced by technical staff, administrative staff and educational support staff of these institutions when trying to find an appropriate solution for the provision of audiovisual content. Therefore this professional network structure also ensures a high level of service support, and consequently, a great confidence to the teachers and other audiovisual content producers in the various academic communities in Portugal. But this project also allowed, since its inception, to consolidate a national community of experts in content development for e-learning and blended learning, especially the audiovisual components. The U. Porto also positioned itself as a pivotal entity in this privileged national network of experts on audiovisual content on education through the training of 80 employees spread across 37 HEI’s in Portugal during the last 2 years. In addition the U.Porto released a set of complementary initiatives ranging from training, workshop sessions and distance learning courses about this technology and this service. This was an ambitious step of this big national project that allowed to build a set of technical teams specialized in the production of educational content and that directly support the academic communities of their own institutions. Currently this project is confirming the high expectations of those involved and is creating even bigger expectations to the future. About 37 HEI’s joined the EDUCast@fccn project with 2306 users and 5882 videos produced and integrated in 748 channels of project platform. These significant quantitative results are the visible part of a set of technological and logistic conditions to start a strong manifestation of significant qualitative results regarding the educational impact of this project in the daily activities of teachers. Aspects such as the better management of lectures that are traditionally less appealing, the attractiveness of the educational contents created through video, the improved productivity of teachers through the recording of audiovisual content, the release and allocation of teaching time for productive activities and to the interactive direct support to the student or even the increase of the students' interest in certain content that traditionally would not be so appealing, are just a few issues that constitute these qualitative aspects.