Virtual Campus as a Core Information Infrastructure of the European University

Abstract

Many European Universities emerged since the first call in 2019, up to now 44 of them. These alliances have some specific goals but also share basic ideas like boosting student, teacher and researcher mobility and cooperation or creating and implementing joint study programmes. To fulfil these shared goals and keep the related processes running smoothly in the alliance, a virtual campus is often envisioned as an information system that will bind the partner universities’ information and fill in the gaps where needed. However, building such a system presents a number of challenges on organisational, informational, and technical levels.In this paper, the basic functionalities of virtual campuses are identified, and a set of specific principles for building such a distributed information system is stated. The architecture of such a system is presented using the example of a particular virtual campus, along with the lessons learned in creating it. The topic is complemented with information on the current state of the system and the future work on this virtual campus.