The consortium of 11 partner institutions composed of public institutions, higher education organisations, and companies from 8 European countries with a dissemination potential to over 400 HEIs from 36 European countries along with 11 associate partners have taken up a bottom-up initiative to influence the HEIs to exchange student information for mobility programmes fully in an electronic way by providing an evidence-based feasibility study with different use case scenarios and the practical solution to build connect all existing systems in one network.
Project objectives:
- Define an electronic ‘EWP Network’ (a kind of student data internet) supporting the exchange of student data in an electronic form through interlinking the existing Erasmus student databases at HEIs.
- Build connecting software modules (connectors) to the EWP Network that are driven by specific standards and protocols.
- Carry out a pilot phase to test out the feasibility of the proposed solutions for all HEIs in Europe.
The EWP project proposed is a response to the current needs of the information society, more specifically a large number of potential end-beneficiaries ranging from students, institutional Erasmus co-ordinators, higher education institutions at large, national agencies, or even the European Commission.
The EWP network is the first attempt to standardize student data transfer on a European-wide scale. It is important to note that the transfer does not involve documents themselves (e.g. scanned copies) but the data themselves that are contained in these documents, so that they can be used for the generation of various documents.
The innovative approach of the present proposal consists in an unprecedented potential to link all higher education institutions in an overall electronic network, resulting in the reduction of cost, efficiency of labour and better access to student data across Europe. This can eventually lead to the permanent migration from the paper world to the electronic world of student data, bringing Erasmus+ to a new era based on state-of-the-art IT technology.