'Three universities for the price of one'

It must be a bizarre experience for students born in the twenty-first century. Want to take a subject at another university? Then you have to print out a form and submit it to an examination board. After approval, the form has to go to a committee at the other institution. In an envelope! Where do you buy that?

This form of data exchange is not only archaic but also opaque. Regularly, students appear at the front desk, disturbed because everything took much longer than they expected.

Hurdle

This state of affairs is very common in education 'outside the door'. "You really have to be a go-getter," says Marja Verstelle. As quartermaster at the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Universities (LDE) strategic education alliance, she is familiar with the complications of educational exchange. The three institutions have been offering the possibility of taking minors back and forth since 2015. But that is easier said than done.

"We would therefore like to double the number of students taking a minor at one of the partners. But in the current way, this is impossible. This is mainly because of the administration at the back end."

In fact, the inconvenience for the students is also experienced by the staff: "It is becoming increasingly difficult for the people behind the scenes who have to manually create all the guest accounts, put registrations into systems and you name it. Everything based on exchanged Excel sheets and PDFs. It's just not doable anymore in terms of volume."

Agreements

LDE students and staff have one advantage: they are not dependent on exam boards that have to approve external minors. Verstelle explains: "Within LDE, we made the deal that all minors are approved in terms of level and quality in advance by the examination committees. That also saves those committees an enormous amount of work. We have agreed: what is good for a Leiden student is also good for a Delft or Rotterdam student."

Furthermore, we reserve 33% of the places in a minor for each other's students. While it is enormously labour-intensive to arrange that, it is a great advantage for students."

One system?

But meanwhile, the three universities still have three minor catalogues. And efficient and secure data exchange is lacking. What to do?

"When we started LDE," says Verstelle, "we looked at a joint system. At the time, that actually seemed to be the only solution for efficiently organising student exchange and the increasing number of joint minors and courses. But the conclusion was: it costs an awful lot of money and takes ten years to set up. And are you going to set up a new system for every new alliance you join?"

This is made possible by a new service, SURFeduhub, Verstelle explains: "That retrieves data on courses from the study guides of member institutions and presents them in a uniform way."

Secure

"That data exchange is inherently secure," says Verstelle. "SURFeduhub only transmits the data, on the fly, and therefore does not store them."

Moreover, at eduXchange, the linking service is combined with eduID. This is a digital identity linked to an individual and thus not to an institution. It is based on an open standard. It is therefore ideal for lifelong learning, but also for alliances between institutions.

Privacy by design is another advantage of eduID. Verstelle: "Via eduID, students can, for instance, indicate which data they want to share with which institution. I expect that our privacy and security officers will be as happy with it as those at EWUU."

Federated solution

SURFeduhub is thus a federated solution to a major practical problem of collaborating educational institutions. "Federative is the way to go," says Verstelle.

Technically, there is one condition for SURFeduhub: each SIS must be provided with a link according to the OOAPI standard. The good news is that every higher education institution will have such a link from 2023. Because then it will be required for the automatic exchange of education data to the RIO (Registration of Institutions and Programmes). There are some differences in the data shared, but the standard is the same.

More alliances

So soon the linking service will be available everywhere. That bodes well for cooperation between educational institutions, Verstelle believes. "The LDE alliance will join the new version of eduXchange that is now being built in March. But Delft, for example, has also been cooperating in a project with Wageningen University for years. That extra piece of education can easily be included in the system in the future."

Verstelle therefore expects alliances to continue to expand in number. "Physical distance is no longer such an issue, because since corona we can all get by with online and hybrid education. Leiden, Delft and Wageningen already participated in the international Virtual Exchange project before that. Everything we encountered administratively then, we can now solve with the federated approach."

Next year, LDE will also start offering joint minors via eduXchange. In time, Verstelle sees choice packages and flexible learning routes also being arranged this way. "The Digital Transformation Impulse for Education can give that whole process a big boost."

Text: Aad van de Wijngaart