Virtual Campus Hub: Toward a concept for international collaboration in education

Abstract

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).