PIM

According to the Online Access Act of 14 August 2017, from 2022 onwards administrative services must also be made available online. As far as education is concerned, the act calls for higher education administrations to digitalize processes where students are their clients.

Here, there is a pressing need for action and the development of practicable and practiceoriented solutions, particularly in connection with international student mobility. Ideally, these should be developed in collaboration with universities in order to make use of their expertise and thus ultimately achieve a higher level of acceptance. Many universities have upgraded their campus management systems in recent years or introduced new ones. In the process, they have developed various components and acquired expertise that creates an important basis for implementing the Online Access Act in higher education.

The project “PIM – Platform for International Student Mobility” is based on the results of a preliminary project in 2019. This preliminary project delivered two important results, which now form the basis for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Firstly, comprehensive specifications, including an architecture vision, were defined. The main elements of this architecture vision are:

• Connection of German universities’ campus management systems to EMREX and EWP
• Nationwide amalgamation of information on modules and
• Recognition of prior learning in standardized form on the basis of ELMO
• Interaction with solutions from the Online Access Act (e.g., Hochschule data exchange standard, national portal, school reports)
• Personal artifact repository for students, e.g., for certificates and other documents (with the prospect of digital credentials)

Secondly, in the framework of the preliminary project, the universities involved compiled feasibility studies for the components needed for an integrated system. The proof of concept for these isolated components was thus produced by various partners. This represents a first step towards an integrated system as an offer that can be utilized by all higher education institutions in Germany. The PIM project is being implemented at Fachhochschule Dortmund in close cooperation with ManDEE (an “International Mobility and Cooperation through Digitalization” project of the German Academic Exchange Service), which is the pilot user for the PIM platform.