European Campus

The main goal of this project and the consortium ESN, UNICA and Youth Agora is to develop a Mobility Information Platform that provides students from all over the world the necessary information to access all opportunities of personal growth offered by a study experience in the European Higher Education Area.

Background

Today, many projects and surveys evaluating the Erasmus programme for student mobility in Europe still regard information provision as one of the least developed aspects and biggest obstacles in successful student mobility.

The annual ESN Survey among other issues outlines the dissatisfying situation regarding information provision. It revealed that students were not satisfied with provision of information at the home and host university – they rated it as 3 (measured on the scale from 1 – very unsatisfied to 5 - very satisfied).

Another interesting project of last year was the Victorious project “Student Mobility in a digital world”. The outcomes from this project give a clear sign regarding the current online situation of information provision for mobile students: “In general, information provision from local university websites is weak. It is hard to find, often in the local language and there is insufficient focus on the needs of the visiting students. Most university International Relations Offices consider that they have good website, although this is not a view borne out by our student data. Many universities need to significantly upgrade their information provision in content and organization.”

Going back in time to the project “Enhancing University International Relations Offices” we also found a lot of interesting concluding remarks that can be considered as the main arguments to set up this project: “The ability to produce web sites but more importantly their updating and maintenance is essential. The break even point between an amateur approach and a good professional site has become an important factor since for most universities “marketing” of their institution abroad is an important academic and economic issue.

Master Website Template

By looking to many master programme websites the current situation and appearance of this type of web pages still encounter many problems and all have the same needs and aims.

A similar situation was found by all the ESN sections a few years ago. The solution was to create website template to fulfill the needs of all the sections with the following main features: standard data exchange format, attractive and easy to update. The same successful initiative will be applied to the European Campus.

The first step will be the design of a Master Template that will aim at fulfilling the needs of the master organisers and students. This template will be attractive, user friendly, dynamic and easy to update and maintain.. It will gather two types of information: formal and non-formal

The formal information will count on the following sections:

Master ID card: Information on the master, the application requirements and procedures, the university
Student ID card: personal details of the student
Static information
Research opportunities
News from the University
E-learning: relevant documents and presentations related to the programme

The non-formal information part will provide news on:

The city and the events (Eventful and Last.fm)
Student life (provided by the local ESN sections and other student organisations)
Master stories of student who already completed the same programme
Social and Professional networking through Facebook (Mentors) and Linkedin (Alumni)

It will be vital in the project to agree on an information charter that supports universities in order to know what kind of information they need to provide and how they need to present it online.

In order to be successful this website template needs to be supported by a content management system that ordinary, non-technical people can update in an extremely intuitive way. This template website needs to be available for download for universities for every course or set of courses they want to promote. It has also to be possible to easily customize it to their corporate identity and needs. The template has to use the latest standards and needs to contain the minimum information according to the proposed information charter.

Drupal is the technology selected to design the template. This open source content management system (GPL) provides fast bug fixing/reporting, high Google rankings, it satisfies the W3C accessibility guidelines, and counts on a huge community and more than 1000 ready to use modules. The same technology is used by big international corporations such as Nokia, Nike, Sony, Disney and the United Nations.

The European Campus

The European Campus platform will collect information from the different university or course websites (formal information) selected by UNICA and other recognized data providers such as the ESN websites (non-formal information) or other existing course databases in a fast and automated way using innovative technologies such as RSS/iCal feeds. This central website will show the collected information to the user in an attractive and user-friendly way, redistribute it among the different stakeholders, and expose it to popular search engines such as Google.

This new concept of “distributed data aggregation” has several strong beneﬁts, such as:

local university websites become automatically a source of knowledge and information for the mobility information platform providing the formal information in an automated way (no manual updating will be needed);
local ESN section websites become automatically a source of knowledge and information for the mobility information platform providing the non-formal information in an automated way (no manual updating will be needed);
geographical presentation of the information through e.g. the use of Google Maps
a European wide search through the information for the prospective visiting student
information collected can be used for statistical purposes, trends analysis etc;

Planning and Roles

For achieving these targets, three steps are considered:

First Pilot Group: Tallinn and Paris – Master Template installation
Second Pilot Group: Stockholm, Zagreb, Cyprus, Vienna and Rome
UNICA Network: Automatic Master Template installation and online support tools

The Pilot Group will have to gather interest within their university by contacting the master programme coordinators of the selected programmes. They are encouraged to designate two people to represent them in the project, somebody dealing with the master programme and someone from the administration. They will also take care of managing the content of their master template test installation. Feedback from their side is also expected.

UNICA will take care of choosing the Master ID card fields, establishing the criteria for the masters to be accepted in the European Campus and will also invite the coordinators from the other universities involved in the project to attend the Pilot group meeting in Tallinn.

ESN will evaluate the master template from the student perspective and be ready for Satellite 3.0, the new version of the popular ESN section website template that will communicate with the master template. They will also take care of establishing links between the ESN satellites and the Master templates and providing stories.

Youth Agora will develop the master template, test the installation of the master programme templates in their servers and provide support with the content management. They will also take care of launching the project website.