European Journal of Higher Education IT 2017-1

This paper discusses digital transformation within higher education and proposes a layered capability model for structuring the required IT capabilities. Changes related to digital transformation are taking place in most institutions and, while there are differences in the selected approaches, similarities can also be observed across the sector. To define the landscape, we use two frameworks to describe those changes. On one hand, we characterise various aspects of the digital transformation in higher education at the institutional level and, on the other hand, we analyse the new expectations for the role of IT within institution due to this change.

Our observations lead to the identification of a layered model of essential IT capabilities that are needed to cope with the ongoing change. We propose to use three layers. Firstly, basic capabilities are needed to provide a solid foundation for digital transformation within the organisation. These capabilities have already been part of best practices in traditional IT provision, but they are paramount to any attempt to engage in a digital transformation. Secondly, standard capabilities will be needed to maintain competitiveness in the ongoing change and will be essential for all institutions that are aiming at keeping abreast with their peers in the increasingly digital higher education business. Thirdly, advanced capabilities will be developed by those institutions that are aiming at using digital business as a competitive advantage. A single institution might not be able to excel in all these capabilities and, consequently, it is assumed that only a subset of them will be implemented in each organisation.

Due to the diversity of the higher education sector and the ongoing innovation in the digital business, this paper is not intended to provide a comprehensive list of the required IT capabilities. Instead, it describes an approach that can be used to evaluate and transform the IT function of any institution to provide sufficient support for the institution’s digital future.

In January 2016 the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) published the specification of a core data set on research activities and recommended a nationwide realization within the german science system. To serve this recommendation the federal state North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) established the federal initiative CRIS.NRW. This paper describes the aim and approach as well as recent activities and their results to succeed and enhance structures of communication and support for the implementation of the Research Core Dataset at universities in NRW.

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.

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).