How ITS and CHARM-EU collaborate on innovation

07 January 2025

Continuous innovations in the field of information technology are of big influence on education organisations. No one knows that better than Ecca Berhitu: he works at the ITS Office of Utrecht University and thinks along on the arrangement of IT in education processes. Janina van Hees is involved in strategic IT choices, but within the European alliance CHARM-EU. Between ITS and CHARM-EU, a constructive collaboration has come about which is beneficial to both parties.

Original article can be found at the Utrecht University website.

Innovative experiments

CHARM-EU is a European university alliance of nine institutions for higher education, including UU. CHARM-EU acts as a testbed for innovations and institutional changes, and can be an environment to test IT innovations at a small scale before they are deployed for UU as a whole. In reverse, CHARM-EU can benefit from the innovation power and expertise of UU. The collaboration between ITS and CHARM-EU has already yielded a number of concrete results.

Student Journey charted

The most important flagship of CHARM-EU is the Master’s programme in ‘Global Challenges for Sustainability’. In this very first European joint degree Master’s programme, students simultaneously enrol at five universities in hybrid education tied challenge-focused and transdisciplinary research. So students and lecturers are spread across multiple locations. But what does the supporting IT infrastructure look like? And what are students’ experiences?

In collaboration with ITS, CHARM-EU has fully charted the student journey. This is an overview in which you see what CHARM-EU Master’s students experience during their degree programmes, and it views everything from four different angles: the organisation, processes, applications and information. In the overview, bottlenecks are indicated too. For ITS, this was a good way to see how valuable such an overview can be.

By charting student journey, you can speak neutrally about bottlenecks and improvement proposals. Therefore, ITS has also made a student journey of the Utrecht University Bachelor’s student. “We’ve got the journey hanging on the wall in our office,” Ecca Berhitu says. “It’s quite impressive and shows well how complicated everything is. We are also going to make drawings of other student journeys we facilitate within UU.”

Rollout of new portfolio tool

Another example of successful collaboration between ITS and CHARM-EU is the introduction of eJournal as a new tool for e-portfolios. In the Master’s programme of CHARM-EU, programmatic testing plays a big role: students are evaluated based on the assignments in their portfolios. CHARM-EU could hitch a ride on a tender issued by ITS for the purchase of a new tool. The Master’s programme ‘Global Challenges for Sustainability’ became the UU pilot and was to first to switch to eJournal. CHARM-EU now shares the experiences with UU degree programmes which also want to get to work with eJournal.

IT Architecture analysis

CHARM-EU works on a long-term vision to shape the IT structure, and that is quite a challenge. This is because earlier stocktaking sessions yielded too little depth. Ecca Berhitu came up with a new idea: a Fit-gap analysis for CHARM-EU. Together with colleague Carolina Nijenhuis, he made an extensive survey to research to which degree the current facilities fit what is needed. In it, they looked at the organisation, processes, information and technology of the CHARM-EU Master’s programme. For instance, how do the systems for enrolment, education and certification work? Are they suitable, not suitable or maybe even too extensive? The goal is a visual overview in which you immediately see where improvements are possible. Ecca says: “This is really a new approach. We usually don’t take the time to evaluate such facilities this thoroughly. If this works at CHARM-EU, we will look into whether or not we can apply this more broadly at UU.”

Experimenting safely

CHARM-EU is by definition an innovative environment. Janina van Hees, who is responsible for the CHARM-EU work package IT Strategy on behalf of UU, says: “Such an environment is valuable to UU in order to experiment safely and at a small scale. Innovation can be tricky and time consuming, but it will eventually improve your process. To UU, it’s a big advantage that we can say, ‘Let’s just try it out at CHARM-EU.’ It’s a collaboration in which both parties win.”

Plans for a next experiment are already being made. UU experts in the field of Identity and Access management are investigating whether or not staff members of the nine partner institutions of CHARM-EU can use each other’s IT services.