Page History

These are the pages of the working group for NRENs with the objective of supporting NRENs4Education, a working group of six NREN's that are passionate about supporting student mobility. We are working to support and lobby for the infrastructure development for an interoperable digital education in Europe. Currently, 13 NRENs feel both an obligation and an opportunity to contribute as NRENs to a more strategic and cohesive approach in developing services to support student mobility: 5 NRENs (CARNET, CSC, Jisc, SIKT, SURF) have committed to actively collaborate to support the European education landscape on their own expenses and 8 NRENs (DeiC, GARR, HEAnet, PSNC, RedIRIS, RESTENA, SUNET, SWITCH), endorse the effort but currently lack the resources to participate actively.  

Our long Long term vision

Why are we doing this? A changing European Education Landscape

• Rise of European student mobility (Erasmus (400.000 student x year), European Universities (64, 560 universities, 35 countries), joint degrees, etc), new initiatives: Competitiveness Compass, Union of Skills (15 B)
• Growing need for coherent IT-support applicablein different contexts, but problem owners are forced into being problem solvers
• Investments in many point solutions without a scaling mechanism
• Limited steering options for EC because of autonomy of education
• Fragmented initiatives fordata mobility without coordination to organize standardisation and interoperability

Ambition

• A strong and well-trained European workforce
• Economic growth & innovation in Europe
• Accelerating the digital & green transition
• Social inclusion & equal opportunities
• Strategic autonomy & European sovereignty

Existing building blocks for change

• Interoperability framework European Digital Education Hub
• European Learning Model European Commission
• EC funded projects, ESCI II, QualityLink, DC4EU, etc
• FOREU4ALL (collaboration of European Universities)
• EUNIS Enterprise Architecture Special Interest Group
• Work of NRENs and GÉANT (EduGAIN, MyAcademicID)

What are our ambitions? 

1. Leadership and Policy

• Establish NRENs and GÉANT as trusted partners of the European Commission in realizing European ambitions for a European Digital Education Area in delivering the infrastructure that is needed.
• Support Europe’s digital sovereignty by advocating that education data and trust infrastructures remain under European control, and ensure a strong economic Europe enabling secure and trusted data exchange that drives innovation and competitiveness in the education sector.
• Strengthen capacity building of NRENs to support cross-border service adoption and local implementation.

2. Technical

• Contribute to a public European education infrastructure with trusted federated and interoperable solutions that enable the student mobility envisioned in the European Education Area of the EC .
• Develop technical solutions for challenges to support this European Education Area through national collaboration, thought leadership, and a broker role, positioning NRENs as central community hubs.
• Ensure sustainability and scalability of technical services and tools that support the European Education Area, including the ability to upscale national solutions through GÉANT.

Our priorities

• Student identity
• European Course Catalogue
• Digital Credentials 

Why do we feel like NRENs should play an important role? Added value of NRENs

• Trusted partners of universities, infrastructure providers, and policy makers
• Part of the education community, work hand-in-hand with universities at national level
• NRENs have joined forces
within GÉANT
• within GÉANT
• Proven providers of successful, large-scale digital services (network, eduroam, eduGAIN, MyAcademicID), showcasing the ability to build secure and interoperable scalable solutions, driver for digital transformation
• Working towards coherent infrastructure for members

What are we working on concretely? 

• Shaping the upcoming GÉANT Strategy 
• Collaboration with GÉANT to support including education-related activities in GÉANT project 5.3 
• Talking with other NRENs on how they view education
• Discussions with the European Commission about funding
• Investigating possibilities for collaboration on use cases and proof of concepts