Meeting at TNC17

The first SIG-TNE meeting took place on 31 May 2017 during the TNC17 conference in Linz, Austria. 

During this meeting the challenges, identified at the previous workshop were addressed. The aim of the meeting was also to identify more NRENs that would benefit from a collaborative approach and guidance from the wider NREN community. The list of participants can be found here.

TNE: Context and Session Objectives 

Esther Wilkinson, Jisc

At the beginning of the session, Esther defined TNE, briefly introducing to what TNE is

the provision of education for students based in a country other than the one in which the awarding institution is located, e.g. students based in country X studying for a degree from a university in country Y

and what types of TNE activities there are (including 'branch campuses', overseas partnerships, distance/online learning).

It was noted that higher education is more advanced in its delivery of TNE, but the work in the area does not exclude other types of educational institutions.

Following number of sessions at various platforms, resulting in a better understanding of the importance of supporting transnational education and mobility with technology requiring global infrastructure and services, SIG-TNE was set up as a part of the GÉANT Community Programme with an international Steering Committee. 

This meeting was a follow up after a preparatory meeting at the Internet2 Global Summit, during which the key challenges and opportunities for working together were identified. There are 4 key areas (The 'Big Issues') that the SIG-TNE will be focussing on (others were identified, but are 'parked' for the time being and might be revisited in the future):

• TNE data - regional, national and global
• Global TNE policies
• Technology barriers
• TNE service deployment; tools, toolkits and resources

One of the objectives of this meeting is to get endorsement for those four issues and scope the activities, divide tasks and contributions to the workstreams.

Following the introduction to the SIG and main working areas, the Steering Committee members that lead those areas gave brief overviews on what their issues are and what needs to be done to solve them.

TNE data: regional, national and global. What exists now… and how do we obtain it? 

Urszula Chomicka, Internet2

Urszula gave a presentation on the UK (Jisc) and USA (Internet2) TNE data collection and outlined the main challenges that NRENs face related to TNE - starting with differences in basic things like spelling (programme vs program) and the variety of definitions used to describe the phenomenon of local/foreign collaboration in the joint design and delivery of an academic programme in a host country, which is only one of the many examples of such confusing terminology in the field of TNE.

There are numerous differences that make TNE data complicated, such as linguistic, cultural, regulatory, methodology, classification, etc - no certral body collects this data, so there is no one universal TNE data system. However, even if there was one, would it contain the data needed by the NRENs? NRENs would be interested in the kinds of programmes that use their services - currently and in the future, to plan for the connectivity in advance.

The two examples that Urszula looked into in more detail were Jisc and Internet2 - the NRENs that are already collecting or have access to higher education data, helping them to identify where their members are at and what help they could potentially need - remote sites of the universities might not be aware of what NRENs can do for them. The overview of the two NRENs and their data sources showed that even between the countries that are more advanced in the field of TNE, the data is approached in different ways. In some other countries, such as China, the data is collected by the government and more data is available than anywhere else, but how can NRENs benefit from it?

NRENs face a number of chalenges:

• different data sets
• different needs for TNE data usage (host vs sending campus)
• different stages of TNE support programme development
• different resources available to tackle this

Ideas for moving forward: NRENs should work together in consolidating the information available into something that can be used to move towards a common way of treating the data, perhaps involving some other national and international organisations and sharing the best practice examples. 

Global TNE policies

Alexander van den Hil, SURFnet

Alexander outlined the TNE issues related to the different policies and demonstrated the need to moving to a position where we all treat the TNE customers the same. 

At the very core of it, there are different connection policies, for example, some countries do not allow connecteing institutions that are not financed by the governement, overseas institutions are classed as 'private' (e.g. Spain). In addition, there are political and technological barriers, for example, government restrictions in China (IpV6, firewall). There are also political barriers that we are not going to solve - such as the ban of institutes from abroad in Hungary - those should still be taken into consideration and possible barriers for collaboration should be removed. The main questions then are:

• Can we treat a foreign institution as a local education institution?
• How to work with country specific barriers?
• Reciprocal agreements?
• Can we come up with a global oriented policy?

Some of the work has been done in this area by Jisc - they have a Strategic Alliance with CERNET, which could potentially be expanded for other GÉANT members. Internet2 has agreements with CERNET and KISTI; GARR is work in progress.                                                                                                                                                                    

Technical Barriers

William Wan, CERNET

One other 'Big Issue' that needs to be taken into consideration when talking about TNE is technical barriers. William grouped those digital divides into 4 main groups:

Suggested services that need to be develped to address the challenges are end-to-end support and 24/7 service desks.

Tools, toolkits and resources

Esther Wilkinson, Jisc

The main tasks of this workstream are to

• identify tools and resources already in existance, 
• to develop a suite of tools and resources
• and to understand requirements of tools and resources to more directly support education institutions or policy stakeholders in the NREN country

to enable NRENs to support TNE, individually and globally and enable accesability.

Esther presented a few examples of existing tools and information sharing platforms that can be used or adopted by NRENs, such as:

• GÉANT Interactive Connectivity Map, 
• UK (Jisc) TNE Tech Special Interest Group, connecting 23 higher education institutions, 
• Jisc TNE Toolkit (checklists for NRENs and education institutions supporting TNE), 
• the blog of case studies In the Field, 
• TNE registration form, used by Jisc and HEAnet
• GÉANT SIG-TNE wiki page

A couple of areas that this group could work on to add onto the abovementioned resources are collecting and publishing country specific info and writing up more success stories for the 'In the Field' blog and other media.

Next steps

• Steering Committee to develop SIG-TNE Workplan based on todays discussions and share on SIG Wiki
• Survey SIG-TNE members on Workplan contents and call for contributors
• Plan and communicate next meetings of SIG-TNE every six months  (on or around November 2017, then TNC18)
• Continue to develop SIG-TNE Wiki site resources