On the 21st and 22nd of March a “technical workshop” about Erasmus without Paper took place in Brussels. It was attended by all consortium partners, as well as by the European Commission.
The participants started the meeting by updating each other on the latest developments, and concluding that there is a very high interest in EWP from all over Europe. For example, a survey was recently sent out by the European University Foundation to higher education institutions all over Europe and more than 1000 institutions filled it in. The findings of the survey showed that staff working with Erasmus students are overloaded and clearly in need of simplified procedures. Perhaps even more striking, approximately 68 % of the respondents felt that the workload has increased since the new Programme started in 2014.
The survey also showed that a very high proportion of the technical side of student exchanges (Inter-Institutional Agreements, Erasmus+ nominations, confirmations of arrival, Learning Agreements and Transcripts of Records) are done by paper or by email – but not automatically. In other words, there are many things to improve and higher education institutions are very interested in it.
The participants discussed various aspects of the project and how to proceed with the technical details. Issues like privacy and security were also tackled. There are, of course, still several challenges to solve before everything will be up and running; for example, many local IT systems are not very integrated with each other and some work will be needed to fix this. However, in general the work is going very well and all project partners are excited about the project.