1. EMREX – Supporting Student Mobility
Steering Group meeting
Pamela Engström

2. Field Trial Why Field trial? Workflow Results
Improvements and lessons learned

3. Field trial Why? Goals in numbers 3-5 Nordic countries and Italy
To develop and improve the tool according to the users’ demands
To run the tools in real life situations
To evaluate the effects of this kind of digital tool
Goals in numbers
3-5 Nordic countries and Italy
100+ To get at least 100 users to transfer their transcripts of records between institutions of higher education

4. Field trial Why these countries?
Long standing cooperation between the Nordic countries
Similar situations in the countries; more or less central Student Information Systems with the ability to affect many HEI:s
Italy was added to test if this would also work in a big EU country with different systems
All countries have large amounts of exchange students, both incoming and outgoing
Assessed high likelihood of success

5. Workflow Field trial 2015 (1)
Production of information material for the field trial and for the emrex.eu website. Material is available at either the web site or at the wiki-space
Digital EMREX handbook, digital flyers (for institutions and stakeholders), EMREX general description, quick guides in several languages, country specific information about study systems and the technical set ups for EMREX-tool, technical guides per country, information at emrex.eu
Finding candidate institutions and students for the field trial is run by each country and shared and supported by rest of the work package

6. Workflow
2015 (2)
Identify exchange students and administrative personnel, introduce the project, track their activities to test the electronic transfer of study records between HEIs through developed tools. Find partner HEIs. Inform about Field trial.
Testing EMREX in test environment
Develop short survey

7. Workflow Field trial 03.2016-09.2017 EMREX in production:
Norway- NCP and SMP, February 2016
Sweden- NCP and SMP, March 2016
Finland- SMP May 2016, NCP August 2016
Italy- NCP September 2016 and SMP September
Denmark- NCP May 2017, no SMP
Poland- As evaluation partner. Along the way Poland also incorporated EMREX to their SIS systems and had users testing
-Monitor usage and give support to project partners, participating institutions and students
-Continuously spread the word about EMREX. International and local conferences, seminars, meetings,

8. Workflow Recruiting students, testing and in production
Norway- all HEIs and all information thru the administrative systems. Direct contact with students
Finland- NCP for all HEIs, SMP chosen HEIs. Personal contact, , meetings and conferences. Direct contact with students
Sweden- NCP and SMP all HEIs. Reference group, newsletter, , meetings and conferences. Direct contact with students
Italy- University of Siena. Meetings, contact with Siena IRO's personell
Denmark- NCP. Meetings, conferences, s.

9. EMREX Field Trial Network
SMP
SMP
EMREG FS
Virta
NCP
SMP
NCP
SMP
SIS
Results out
STADS
A short description of witch systems that corresponds to each other in respective country, and highlight the technical solutions that are already in use today. And stress that the countries themselves choose if logging in should go through the HEIs local student platforms or through a national system. The picture depict the different solutions in the different countries.
In some countries both SMP and NCP, in some just the NCP
All HEIs in Norway both ways
All HEIs data (incoming) in Finland, Sweden and some outgoing HEIs
NCP in Denmark
2-3 big Universities in Italy
What I think you should also stress is the fact that in countries with a central database or access to data (like in Finland and Norway) we have actually the whole country included in the field trial with one NCP. So easy to extend to full production.
LadokPing
NCP
STADS
NCP
E3N
NCP I
NCP I
SMP
STADS
SMP
(Results in)
SMP
Ladok
SMP
DANS/INT

10. Results
361 users in 6 countries
Users between all partners

11. Student feed back (from short survey in the SMP)
"I've tested the Swedish implementation of Emrex and although it worked without flaw I have some concerns about the information you get about the courses that are shown The courses etcetera are all in Swedish. If I want to show any foreign HIS this they won't understand anything about what the course names mean The information on each course is quite narrow. I would like to see some extra information in the line of things like main field of study, to broaden the possibility for a foreign HIS to understand the courses being shown.“
“My name was somehow registered differently at my exchange university and University of Helsinki and I couldn't import my courses."
"I didn't find all my courses, and I don't know why"

12. Student feed back (from short survey in the SMP)
"I do not see my grades, and the ""titles"" for my courses are not the same as in reality”
”If there is statistics in each course, e.g. distribution of grades, then it would be good to be able to import that as well”
“That was so easy and nice! Thank you very much! I thought it would be very difficult and take very long time. Thank you!"
"Very easy to use, the only thing that could be improved is that it claims my name/birthday don't match”
"The search function of a certain period and the change of languages worked very well. The system is easy to use"

13. Administrator feed back (from EMREX qualitative study, interviews March and April 2017)
”If the information is in the (…) system, then it is automatically considered reliable, because it´s there already.” (Erasmus institutional coordinator)
”It (EMREX) would provide authenticated transcript of record that we could trust at least” (Staff meber responsible for IT systems)

14. Administrator feed back (from EMREX qualitative study, interviews March and April 2017)
”I think it has big perspectives if it gets rolled out, so it´s a lot of universities that participate. If it stays in a small number then it won´t be that interesting, because then we still have to have the general making of transcripts (…). But if it could grow and be, say, half of our Erasmus partners or even more, then it would be very interesting. Because right now a lot of transcripts that we send out will either be lost in the mail or be sent to the wrong address. (Staff member working with IT systems, formerly academic advisor for outgoing students)

15. Spin off´s
Poland
Holland (DUO)
CHESICC (China Higher Education Student Information and Career Center)
Admission
Swedish SMP

16. Improvements and lessons learned
Access times to student portals
All systems must work all the time
Support between institutions in different countries
ID information may vary between countries
It must be VERY easy for the students!
The more countries involved the more interest from students and HEIs