Education • In Focus

Collaboration across borders: the CHARM-EU case

4 weeks ago

European university alliances are on the rise. Currently, multiple educational institutions are participating in a European Commission initiative. CHARM-EU, the alliance Utrecht University belongs to, has nine institutions from seven countries. How do you organise IT, with all those different systems, legislations and ways of working? Here’s a perspective from Utrecht University on the collaboration.

Janina van Hees and Ecca Berhitu from Utrecht University share how they are tackling the challenge of interoperability. “The joint master’s is the largest educational product within our alliance,” says Janina van Hees, project manager and Lead IT Strategy at CHARM-EU. “In September, the fifth cohort will start; then, for the first time, all nine partners will participate. Students follow the programme synchronously in multiple locations. That’s quite an operation.”

“We are actually bringing Europe closer together. How? By getting things going collectively and building something that works for everyone.”

Janina van Hees en Ecca Berhitu kijken lachend naar elkaar.
Janina van Hees and Ecca Berhitu

Pragmatic solutions

To make this possible, CHARM-EU developed hybrid classrooms, which allow students to study from their own campus at the same time. The University of Barcelona handles the enrollment process, but all institutions must have the same student data and process them in their own systems. “That can be done manually, but of course you don’t want that,” says Janina. “We are investigating whether we can automate that with the Open Education API.”

Then there is the authentication issue: students need to be able to log in to the learning environment. How do you arrange that across institutions and countries? “And eventually you also want to issue a diploma,” Janina continues. “That is now physically signed in five places, soon in nine. That process takes four months! We are looking at whether digital signing is possible, but laws and regulations get in the way. In practice, we often have to look for pragmatic solutions. Then it works, and from there you can improve processes further.”

National contexts

“That doesn’t mean we are being very reactive,” says Ecca Berhitu, enterprise architect at Utrecht University. “Indeed, the issues at play and what we are up against are the usual suspects: identities, the course catalogue, standards for data. But what we do discover within the alliance is the context in which those issues arise. You have to ask the different institutions about it, and then you come back with surprising things, which you don’t think about as a Dutch institution.”

“In Hungary, for example, they always register the mother’s surname,” says Janina. “That has to do with national legislation. While elsewhere, this is a common security question for when someone has lost their password. So we work with systems that may look similar on paper, but in practice are heavily influenced by national context. And that is exactly why this work is so important: we actually bring Europe closer together. By getting things working collectively and building something that works for everyone. We call that a seamless experience. To do so, we have to cross thresholds, but we also learn an awful lot from each other. Starting from pragmatic solutions, we work towards sustainable improvements.”

Working on a common language

Cooperation across national borders requires more than technical solutions. This also applies to the alliance’s partners’ technological cooperation. “When we first got together with all the IT people two years ago, it turned out that we were all using different terms for the same things,” says Ecca. “Scheduling, admission and enrollment… Everyone just called it differently and also had a different image of it.”

“Without interoperability, you keep running into limitations”

Importance of interoperability

Working within CHARM-EU makes it crystal clear how important interoperability is. “The more you want to do together, the more complex it becomes,” says Ecca. “If you’re not interoperable yet, i.e. if systems don’t connect properly, it comes at the expense of the student experience.”

“Sometimes it seems like a small detail,” he continues, “like registering the mother’s surname. But if you don’t solve things like that, you can’t automate processes properly. And without interoperability, you keep running into limitations. In Europe, we just haven’t reached the point where everything can be automated and effortless. Until then, we must continue to seek cooperation and try to work on solutions.”

Alliance as testing ground for IT innovation

CHARM-EU is more than an international collaboration for Utrecht University. It acts as a testing ground for digital collaboration across all kinds of borders. “It is a manageable alliance with a manageable group of students,” says Janina. “Despite the complexity of the national contexts, it is an ideal environment to try things out. You learn a lot about how international cooperation works, and what of it is useful for wider applications.” Ecca adds: “You actually have a lot of freedom of movement within such an alliance. Little is fixed yet, so you can really build something.”

What is a European university alliance?

European university alliances are international partnerships between higher education institutions. They are part of the European Commission’s European Universities Initiative, which stems from a proposal made by French President Macron in 2017. The initiative contributes to the development of a strong European Education Area in which students, teachers and researchers can move and cooperate freely. A total of 64 alliances are active.

This shortened article was written by SURF. The original and complete version of this article can be found on SURF.nl

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