Interview with Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos , who is leading the implementation of the EPICUR Inter-University Campus. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece in the research area of Internet Technologies in Education.
Main objectives of the EPICUR Inter-University Campus are the following:
Taken together, these steps are expected to contribute to significantly boosting EPICUR mobility at the level of the alliance, which was one of the main aspirations of the European Commission when launching the European Universities Initiative.
The EPICUR Inter-University Campus is a central platform for:
The following figure is presenting the interaction inside the platform (Figure 3).
Anouk Tso, WP2 Leader (UvA) offered the following comments on the first pilot run: “For the team involved in developing the EPICUR Language & Culture pilots the EPICUR VCLP and VURS have become indispensable applications already during this very first test run! Opening up a total of 27 courses hosted by 5 different partner universities to the entire EPICUR student community would have been impossible without the VURS application, which allowed all colleagues to have access to all applications 24/7 and in real time and collaborate on the joint review process. For us, the VURS feels like our online EPICUR secretariat and we can hardly imagine our EPICUR life without it anymore! The same goes for the VCLP, as a gateway to both students and lecturers involved in our courses, it is wonderful to be able to guide members of our community to the EPICUR ‘go-to place’.”
The EPICUR Alliance has already achieved a huge milestone: To create the first digital infrastructure to support virtual mobilities. This milestone has been achieved much earlier than defined in the official workplan. Therefore, we are confident that the EPICUR alliance will be fully supported by digital services like creation of transcripts of records, online Community of Practices.
It is a rather big development team working in the context of WP4 (Pave the way for an Inter-University Campus, using a student and staff centered approach). The team consists of the following members:
The above team is fully supported by the EPICUR WP2 Leader (Anouk Tso, UvA) and WP3 leaders (Steve Randall and Steffi Klose, ALU-FR). A special acknowledgment goes to Dimitrios Koveos, Vice Rector for Academic and Student Affairs of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), for his vision to implement VURS module and his continuous support.
Most of the members of our team already had experience working with other universities (not members of this alliance). However, it is the first time working in the context of this alliance. The experience is pretty good!
There were many challenges to develop such a project. An indicative list is the following:
Steven Randall (WP3 leader, ALU-FR) thoughts on the challenges: “The main challenges including determining appropriate permissions/access and then moving quickly toward integration across an alliance in which each partner uses varying combinations of systems at their home campuses. There is great value in taking the bold step of moving forward with these integration challenges early in the project so that we are ready with a system by the time the pilot phase ends.”
The first direction is the definition, adoption and digitalization of standardized solutions to interconnect the systems. These solutions should be based, from the technical point of view on free and open-source software. Also, the participation of every university not only in the development team but also in the pilot phase will be beneficial. More specifically at least a critical mass of professors, students and admin staff should participate from every university of the alliance to the pilot phase in order to evaluate the system as well as the process and then to improve the EPICUR Inter-University Campus accordingly.
