The experience of Lund University

The third chapter of the series on the deployment of the European Student Identifier puts under the spotlight a higher education institution from Sweden: Lund University. 

In the following interview, Martin Charlier, Project Manager at Student Experience Mobility from the Division of External Relations International Office discusses how he and his colleague from the IT department, Eskil Swahn, worked together towards the implementation of the ESI in Lund University.

Q:  Who initiated the deployment? What did you do exactly? 

Martin: The Swedish National Agency initiated the deployment of the ESI with a recommendation forwarded to all Swedish universities. They informed via email our IT architect, Eskil Swahn, about the need to deploy the European Student Identifier, and provided him with general information on the application for the Log in use. 

I was not aware of this initial contact, which is why I reached out to Eskil a while later, adding up to the information he had already received. It was quite illuminating for him to learn about the multiple uses of the ESI. Apart from the simple log in need, we (Lund University) required the ESI for the OLAs as well. 

I would like to mention that the ESI is not deployed at the national level. It’s the responsibility of each university to take care of its implementation independently. As far as I know, all 5 major universities in Sweden have completed the deployment of the ESI. Just one university decided not to follow the recommendation of the National Agency.

Q: Was the request you received initially about the deployment of the ESI straightforward?  Is there any extra information that would have made your work easier?

M: Yes, the information received was quite straightforward. Our IT architect clearly understood what was needed from a technical point of view. However, I helped him to connect the dots, providing the missing link. By identifying all the areas of use of the ESI, Eskil was able to have the full picture. As mentioned above, the NA gave some general information, but from the IT perspective it was limited and there were doubts on the timeline.

Eskil compared the ESI to the ORCID iD, an ID specific to a PhD student or researcher. The ESI is similar because it follows the person/student no matter in which university they may decide to go. Hence, there is no need to create multiple ESI for a single student when they go to different universities.

Q: How would you describe the optimal process of deploying the ESI at a university? Who does what and in which order?

M: In a way, you could say our case was the optimal process, at least for us. Since the beginning, I knew whom to reach out to because I had previously established contact with the department that would have to technically take care of the implementation. This made it easy and straightforward. I would say that if the person does not know who to go to and whom to contact then there might be some problems. 

From a procedural point of view, everything went well. It was only the timing that could have been chosen differently. In my opinion, we deployed the ESI a bit too late.

As for our IT architect, he would have liked to have more detailed information upfront in order to discuss the bigger picture and have the opportunity to steer the conversation (with the National Agency) accordingly. 

In autumn 2021, our university was connected to the EWP Network and able to use and exchange OLAs. There was a problem: the OLAs required the creation of the ESI. At the time, however, the university didn´t have the capacity to deploy it. Consequently, our third-party provider – SoleMove – had to create fake ESIs. The conditio sine qua non for the connection to the EWP Network was for the 3PP to provide the ESI. Without it, the system could not have been connected. This meant that SoleMove had to create fake temporary ESIs to make up for the fact that the university had not deployed it yet. 

Q: Did you need any (external) support with the deployment process? If so, in what way was it helpful?

M: The only external support was from the third-party provider, who provides the software to mobility flow management at Lund University. We contacted them since we needed to know whether the system was ready to handle the integration and to fetch information from the other systems involved in the process. Once we got their green light, we were able to move forward. 

Q: How would you rate the difficulty of the deployment of the ESI from the technical point of view on a scale of 1-7, where 1 is very easy, and 7 is very complicated?

M: On a scale from 1 to 7, our IT personnel rates the difficulty to 3. Not because there was a lot of work that needed to be done, not in terms of workload, rather in terms of the complexity due to the fact that different systems (four systems in total) were affected. 

The positive aspect was that Lund university had already taken care of the integration aspect beforehand. The systems were already integrated with one another. We just needed to make sure that they could handle all the data exchange on the one hand, and, on the other hand, some adjustments had to be made. 

Another element of difficulty was the testing part, which required some time. Other than that, the procedure was quite manageable and we didn’t face any major obstacle. 

Q: What was the biggest challenge of the procedure? How did they overcome it? 

M: The biggest challenge for the IT department related to the information received. Either it was too vague or too specific. Eskil stressed that the how, when and the exact deadline had not been properly communicated to him. He didn´t know all the potential uses of the ESI. 

As for me, the challenge was that the OLA initially ran with fake ESI. This issue didn’t concern only Lund University, but all the other third-party providers users, such as for example MoveOn users.

As a result, I had to carefully monitor the process. When the ESI was implemented by Lund University, I had a meeting with SoleMove to inform them about the necessity to replace the fake ESI with the new official ones. Although SoleMove managed to replace them in their system, I am not sure whether the update is reflected in the EWP network. For this reason, I have to make sure that the institutions whose OLAs have been created with the fake ESI are notified about this change and proceed with the update if this didn’t happen automatically. It is rather time consuming as I have to identify the OLAs and send notification emails to the concerned HEIs.

Q:  How long did it take to complete the whole process?

M: Overall, it took us around 9 months to complete the deployment. The first notification from the National Agency arrived in late spring 2021 and in autumn of the same year I contacted Eskil. 

We had some delays due to some technical issues. Only when they were resolved we could move forward with the deployment which was completed in March 2022. 

Q:  Why do you think it is important to have the ESI at the university?

M: Being an international university, Lund University deals with incoming and outgoing students. 

It goes without saying that whenever a new technology aimed at relieving the administrative burden of mobility management is released, it is always well received and welcomed both by the staff and the IT department.

I believe that it is a necessary step towards a more internationally integrated higher education community at the EU level. 

I would also like to add that Lund University is part of the EUGLOH, European University Alliance for Global Health, one of the University Alliances established at the European level. Currently, the Alliance counts 5 members, soon 9 and if all of them will have deployed the ESI, the implications are immense. We could even foresee Alliance-specific uses for the ESI. I believe we will ripe its benefits in this context as well. In fact, if the ESI had not existed, we probably would have to create it for the Alliance itself.

 

 

In case you missed the previous articles of the “Demystifying the European Student Identifier” series, you can read Chapter I – A success story about how to deploy the ESI at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest here and Chapter II -The Croatian case: How the University of Split adopted the ESI here.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels.