Online Learning Agreement

The EU has adopted, within the modernisation agenda for higher education systems in Europe, the very ambitious goal of reaching 20% of mobile students by 2020. While in some member states this number is far from being reached, in other member states, such as the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, over 95% of students spend part of their studies abroad. However, the aim of making mobility rather the rule than the exception considerably increases the administrative burden on higher education institutions and the need to remove the obstacles to student mobility.

In the process of organising credit mobility, students and higher education staff members must conclude trilateral Learning Agreements that are the basis for the recognition of academic qualifications obtained abroad. As identified by the PRIME survey, conducted by the Erasmus Student Network in 2010-11, the Learning Agreements are a cornerstone and at the same time one main obstacle to the smooth organisation of credit mobility. The interlocutors are indeed not clearly defined, the information needed to build the agreements rarely available online and the possibility that students change their learning agreement after their arrival at the receiving HEIs lies at 75%. In the same survey, some LLP National Agencies suggested building an online tool to prepare, approve and revise Learning Agreements in an online environment and this is what this project intends to do.

The objective of the project was to enable students to prepare their Learning Agreements within an online system that then allows them to liaise with the coordinators of sending and receiving higher education institutions to finalise the document, approve and sign it online. This process, therefore, transfers a paper-based workflow, which is reliant on timely postal deliveries for signature purposes, into an online system that allows students to gain considerable time when preparing their studies abroad and induce a greater degree of flexibility and efficiency when needing to revise the Learning Agreement. The online software also allows higher education institutions to mainstream the workflows of the management of the learning agreements to render the process of approving and managing them more efficient, and thus freeing up time for the staff members to work on other international relation activities or improve the quality of credit mobility.

Partners: European University Foundation, Lodz University of Technology, University of Luxembourg, University of Lorraine, University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, University of Aveiro, European Humanities University and the Erasmus Student Network.