Interoperability
To give students more flexibility when studying, including outside their institutions, products, systems and organisations must be able to cooperate and exchange information without restrictions. They must be 'interoperable'. This is often not yet the case. That is why SURF, at home and abroad, works together to increase interoperability.
Explanation & background interoperability in education
More freedom of choice for students and growing internationalisation in education requires interoperability within and beyond national borders. That is because it ensures that users nationally and internationally can share and exchange information easily, reliably and securely. If different systems and platforms work well together, developers can design new and innovative solutions and easily integrate them into existing education systems.
What challenges do we face?
Several countries and (international) projects are working on interoperability, but cooperation between countries and projects does not really exist yet. We therefore first map which parties use which standards for which processes and information flows. In addition, we look at who and what is needed to jointly achieve an international interoperable ecosystem for education.
Why is SURF committed to interoperability?
- Dutch education is very well organised. By acting together as a country, we can influence the harmonisation of standards and architecture within Europe.
- Dutch educational institutions lead the way in organising national interoperability. If we can scale up Dutch developments, institutions can continue to use standards that already work well in the Netherlands.
- Dutch developments remain in line with international developments and regulations: we avoid our members having to switch over at a later date.
- Dutch students can not only easily follow education at Dutch educational institutions, but also worldwide.
- Finally, we can make use of international knowledge and expertise on standards and interoperability and thus accelerate and strengthen our own developments.