Erasmus Student Mobility
In the last years the Erasmus programme has undergone a monumental expansion growing from 11 participating countries and around 3,000 students in 1987, to 33 participating countries and more than 9 million people having benefited from mobility under Erasmus by 2017. The procedures in place however have remained largely paper based – until recently. The European Commission under the European Student Card Initiative aims to “enable every student to easily and safely identify and register themselves electronically at higher education institutions within the EU when moving abroad for studies, eliminating the need to complete on-site registration procedures and paperwork”. Under this initiative Erasmus Without Paper project was funded to develop core tools to move towards a paperless process for student mobility exchange.
Since 2019, GÉANT with Renater, Sunet and more recently Srce are participating in my MyAcademicID project (co-funded by Connecting Europe Facilities, INEA/CEF/ICT/A20128/1633245 Action No: 2018-EU-IA-0036 ). The project aims to define the specifications of the eID scheme, including the bridges between eIDAS and eduGAIN, the structure of the European Student Identifier, and the functioning of the Service Provider (SP) Proxy that will connect key electronic services for student mobility to eduGAIN and eIDAS.
This eID scheme will allow students to easily identify and authenticate using their institutional credentials to access electronic student services through single sign-on.
This marks the beginning of a very fruitful collaboration between the Erasmus and the GÉANT communities, and opens new opportunities to interoperate with eIDAS. This collaboration will continue beyond 2020 via a follow up project which was recently approved.
