European Journal of Higher Education IT 2017-1

The CIO surveys in German Higher Education Institutions (HEI) allow a unique access to the development process of different IT-Governance implementations across a diverse developed university culture. This culture is often influenced by the traditions, the history and local politics in a specific way but also with a large variety. Not at all surprisingly, the individual HEI only slowly adopts different practices which primarily had been developed in countries with high tuition rates and thus a greater need for cost control and overall guidance. This paper therefore investigates if and how an overall benefit is visible for those institutions which build and implement a specific IT-Governance.

The application of the global complexity index being developed by the CHEITA community as a baseline for comparison does reveal additional valuable insights. Especially the lack of payoff in the application of service management frameworks and increased benefit of the continuous awareness around information security becomes visible. Institutions investing in security awareness show a better spending rate in comparison to their peers on the GCI scale. Institutions spending their budget on the optimisation of the service portfolio fail to demonstrate their advantages. In general, bigger institutions allow their CIOs better to follow their goals. They also grant their CIOs effective access to the board of directors. In consequence, those CIOs can demonstrate a higher value of IT for their institutions.

Having recognized the need for a national digital asset management infrastructure, SRCE –  University of Zagreb University Computing Centre in association with a number of research and higher education institutions in Croatia built a national repository system called DABAR –  Digital academic archives and repositories. DABAR provides research and higher education institutions with the common infrastructure necessary to establish a secure, reliable and interoperable institutional repositories in a simple way. Dabar allows institutions to manage their digital assets without the need to deal with technical issues related to the implementation and maintenance of digital repositories.

Until the middle of March 2017, DABAR was used to build two national repositories and 109 repositories of Croatian research and higher education institutions. Currently, it supports curation of electronic theses and dissertations, and papers published in electronic journals. The support for conference papers, book chapters, artistic works (photographs and other audio-visual objects) is being actively developed and a plan to build a support for managing research data sets and educational resources is in place.

The DABAR platform and the community gathered around it are actively promoting Open Access to the results of research and to educational modules and resources.

This paper deals with detection of flooding attacks which are the most common type of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in a Mobile Agent World. We propose a new framework for the detection of flooding attacks by integrating Divergence measures over Sketch data structure. The performance of the proposed framework is investigated in terms of detection probability and false alarm ratio. We focus on tuning the parameter of Divergence Measures to optimize the performance. We conduct performance analysis over publicly available real IP traces, in Mobile Agent Network, integrated with flooding attacks. Our analysis results prove that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing solutions.

Based on national eID solutions for university process scenarios this paper discusses eIDAS extensions with regard to chances, changes, benefits and challenges compared to eID.

Several initiatives in Europe are involved in the development of frameworks to improve student mobility. These aim at the harmonization of student data formats/forms and appropriate IT support for administrative procedures. Examples include the EUNIS task force for students mobility (formerly RS3G) or the Groningen Declaration Network or the Erasmus without Paper Project [11, 12, 25, 29]. Besides the standardization of forms and procedures security, privacy and legal binding of these is an important issue and hence discussed in this paper. The use of security functions like qualified signatures and the eID of the German national identity card (eID/PA or GeID/PA [2]) opened up new possibilities for the digitalization of legally binding processes in university management in Germany.

Some of these innovations were developed within the projects “eCampus/Scampii” and “eID at universities” [20, 22, 23, 24], based on national signature and eID frameworks in Germany. Furthermore, chances and changes for security and legal binding by eIDAS regulation ([10], prepared by the STORK projects [14]) based extensions at university management are discussed in regard to the ongoing EU funded project TREATS (Trans European Authentication Services, funded by EU CEF Program).

The purpose of this paper is to describe legislative process using the terms of software engineering and to propose some new manners of detecting and avoiding defects in new law acts. The idea of software tester’s approach to lawmaking comes from the observation that software development and legislative process are similar. Paragraph 2 contains an explanation of that similarity, definition of some basic software testing terms and a basic discussion on the topic. Paragraph 3 presents some basic software development models. In paragraph 4, one can find a brief description of the legislative process in the Republic of Poland. Paragraph 5 contains a discussion on concepts concerning making better law. I give two new ideas: dividing legislative bills into two documents and setting off the Law Testing Committee, that would lead to better validation and verification of legislative acts.

The introduction of e-Assessment is hindered by reservations, despite e-Assessment being a valuable tool for teaching and examining in general. These reservations concern mainly the fairness and reliability of e-Assessment as well as financial questions. The latter can be solved in practice by utilizing BYOD, since most of today’s students already possess devices that are capable of being used for e-Assessment. This poses, however, additional challenges to the fairness and reliability of e-Assessment. This paper presents an approach that utilizes cryptographic methods, like public key cryptography and digital signatures, and the version control system GIT in order to overcome this challenges. Based on these techniques a framework for e-Assessment was implemented as client-server architecture.