Title / Topic | Pitch (150 words) | Name of submitter | Email of submitter |
---|---|---|---|
(example) | This issue is relevant for teachers, students, university deans and CIOs as well as the national NRENs. It is a future activity that will gain more importance in the future....e.t.c. | gyongyi.horvath@geant.org | |
Stimulating the adoption of open standards | In higher education, ICT is used more and more for collaboration and communication purposes. But not every institution uses the same software. Interoperability allows for improved compatibility between different systems, and makes it easier to share data. Using standards enables data to be exchanged simply, securely and reliably, which benefits the quality of the exchange. It is also more economical and efficient to create and maintain a single interface and to avoid supplier dependence. Reaping the full benefits of standards requires a widespread adoption; applications can only be interfaced simply if as many parties as possible commit to the standards. As NRENs we can play an important role in stimulating the application of standards at suppliers, who work cross border. We can also play a joint role in promoting standards at institutions by promoting standards that are important for organizing future-proof education. | Jasmijn Wijn (SURFnet) & Wietze de Vries (SUNET) | jasmijn.wijn@surfnet.nl (on leave from 19 September till 14 October 2019) |
eduID | In the society of the future, boundaries between institutions fade. Students want to study outside of their own institution, even international. They are interested in a variety of different courses or they want to combine subjects that cannot be found within a single institution. Moreover, education institutions are offering joint programmes. | Michiel Schok (SURFnet) | |
e-Assessment / digital exams | Norwegian and Finnish concepts for digital exams. | Marjut Anderson, CSC Elisabeth Guillot, Unit | marjut.anderson@csc.fi |
Accessibility | Due to the European directive on web accessibility, many countries has ratified the directive and formed a law. In Sweden the universities find it somewhat difficult to interpret the law and are looking for a way to cooperate on this. The cooperation is mainly focused around subtitling of videos but the universities are also looking for a model that includes all the aspects. | Birgitta Hemmingsson, SUNET | birgitta.hemmingsson@sunet.se |
Edu services in NRENs and organizational aspects | Traditional NREN is increasing its service portfolio within education solutions. Many of these services are quite different from traditional services in NRENs. Much is about joint procurement, follow-up of major international suppliers, influence and development of major solutions used in an international education market, risk management, collaboration on joint work processes, facilitation of collaboration on training and experience sharing between universities, development of joint integrations, etc. Some questions that may be interesting to discuss:
| Vegard Moen, Unit | vegard.moen@unit.no |
eduBadges | At SURF we strongly believe that open badges enable micro-credentialing and therefore are the new digital currency for learning that fit well within a rapidly changing educational system. We see an increasing demand for a more transparent and flexible curriculum, which better suits the personal ambition- and qualification level of the individual student and meet the needs of employers.
| Frans Ward, SURFnet Alexander Blanc, SURFnet | |
NGLE (and or NGDLE?) | The aim is to develop an innovative ecosystem that facilitates more open, effective and efficient co-design, co-creation and use of digital content, tools and services specially adapted for personalised, collaborative or experimental learning by students preparing for university. The learning context from the perspective of the students is the intersection of formal and informal spaces, a dynamic hybrid learning environment where synchronous activities meet in both virtual and real dimensions. We will address project based learning and peer-to-peer learning scenarios. We strongly believe that all the tools and services the project is going to use and/or make available (i.e. incorporate, design, develop and test) must be sustainable after the lifetime of the project. The project is going to develop business plans and investigate appropriate business models using the expertise of the Small Medium Enterprise and National Research and Education Network partners and their contacts with third-party business actors. Our plan is to make it easy for new schools to join the Up2U infrastructure and ecosystem that will form a federated market-place for the learning community. | Erik Kikkenborg (NORDUnet) | erik.kikkenborg@nordu.net |
Assuring Quality in Higher Education through Innovative Teaching and Learning Systems | With the growing proliferation of electronic resources, fuelled especially by wider use of Information and Communication Technologies, higher education institutions have increasingly come under pressure to provide their users with access to more materials and services, even as their budgets have remained flat, or worse, have contracted. National Research and Education Networks and Library consortia are expected to provide a logical response to these demands for costly electronic resource services, but the prerequisite for access and delivery - a reliable ICT infrastructure – has not always been available in many countries. This paper illustrates how technologies such as Learning Management Systems, e-learning, institutional repositories and web portals (integrated management information systems) are used to ensure effective and efficient access to information. It will also provide a road map for partnerships to support the development of innovative teaching and learning systems in higher education and research community can be built and sustained. | Thomas Songu (SLREN) | tsongu@njala.edu.sl |
Digital certificates & security | A good trend of graduate certificates being issued as fake one which is a social malaise and very difficult to prevent using policing. This becomes too malicious when these certificates are produced to a potential employer or foreign institutes (local or abroad) where someone wants to shift his credit while seeking admission. Authority comes to know about this fabrication after a hell long period of time. Even it sometimes goes unnoticed if none complains. The verification process through issuing letter or email creates inordinate delay and sometimes the verification process is itself questionable. There is a national and international urge to stop production of this fake certificate which dilutes the value of genuine certificate and devalues the claims and rights of real certificate holder. BdREN would like to introduce Identity Federation for Higher Educational Institutes (HEI) and offer blockchain based, digitally stamped graduate certificate generation and verification; system as a service to the member institutions. Universities will be joining in a federation wherefrom authorized representative of each university will use his/her home credential to login to the application system to generate the digitally stamped certificate. Once generated anyone from internet will be able to verify the authenticity of that certificate. Requirement from the client side will be a Laptop/Desktop with webcam, Internet connectivity and right credential. Employers can also verify the certificates over Internet. | Tawrit (BDREN) | |