I have been looking at student mobility in the UK. What I mean by student mobility is how a student can choose when and where to study, at a time and place that is suitable for them. It’s about enabling students to take parts of courses from different institutions. This (in theory) is possible now, but was challenging for students from both a financial perspective and administratively.
One of the use cases of the European Higher Education Interoperability Framework is about discovery.
Enhancing the visibility and comparability of diverse learning and mobility opportunities across HEls, emphasising the importance of machine-readable metadata for easy comparison and discovery.
The discovery use case marks the beginning of the learner journey. This use case focuses on the concept of a course catalogue.
Student story
Margo wants to study towards a degree but wants to combine different modules from different courses across Europe. She knows the subjects she is interested in; she also knows which countries where she would like to study. However, she doesn’t know which universities across Europe offer which modules. Discovery would allow Freya to access the course and module catalogues from across a range of universities, compare different offerings and would be able to refine her search based on specific criteria. She would also be sure that the information she finds is up to date.
When you start looking into discovery you start to realise that there are quite a few different doors into discovering what higher education is on offer.
Firstly every higher education institution offers a catalogue of courses, usually on their website, often they will also offer a print prospectus.
If you are looking at a three year undergraduate degree and you have just finished your A Levels then the UCAS website can tell what courses are out there and other can use it as well.
The government has a website, DiscoverUni, which uses HESA data to provide information on what higher education courses are been delivered.
The Student Loans Company also has a list of courses, not all courses, but all those that can be funded by a student loan.
However the data requirements for all these services are different. So, each institution has to provide the data to all the services using a different structure and format. This must add to the administrative burden for institutions. Also, at the moment this isn’t dynamic data, so regular updates need to be provided.
Of course from a student perspective, discovering and choosing a course is one thing, the next stage is application. Only one of these services, UCAS, providers an application route. With the other discovery services, the student will need to work out how to apply, whether that be through UCAS, or going direct to the providers’ website. Each higher education institution has a different process of application, virtually all will ask you to create an account on their application portal, and you will need to do this each time for different institutions.
LLE will add a huge level of complexity to the student experience in discovering courses as well as increasing the number of applications. At one stage a prospective student may be looking on the provider’s website, then they will need to check the SLC website, then they will need to apply, which may be on the provider’s website or potentially through UCAS. They will then need to do this each time they want to complete a module of study.
In many ways, discovery is one of the more simple use cases, the data requirements are quite minimal. However, the reality is that there are multiple stakeholders with different needs and requirements, so getting consensus and agreement could be challenging.
