The EPICUR Campus

The EPICUR Campus is an inter university digital ecosystem that consists of two main modules: the Virtual Campus Learning Platform (VCLP), and the Virtual University Registrar System (VURS).

VCLP plays the role of a decentralized Learning Management System: https://learn.epicur.education/

VURS is the EPICUR centralised Campus Management System offering four applications for supporting the following groups of users:

• EPICUR students: https://students.epicur.auth.gr
• EPICUR professors: https://faculty.epicur.auth.gr/
• EPICUR admin staff: https://registrar.epicur.auth.gr/  
• Prospective students: https://register.epicur.auth.gr/

The aims of the EPICUR Campus

The EPICUR Campus is a central online gateway for supporting flexible online, physical and hybrid mobilities for members of the universities of the alliance. Its primary aim is to fully digitalize the mobility admission, selection and monitoring process by offering a secure, scalable and transparent solution based on free and open-source solutions.

Main objectives of the EPICUR Campus are the following:

• to offer innovative functionality to monitor and recognize mobilities (analytics, gamification),
• to minimize manual administrative work for supporting mobilities,
• to be interoperable and scalable in order to support inter-alliance mobilities, other alliances or associated partners.

Taken together, these steps are expected to contribute to significantly boosting EPICUR mobility at the level of the alliance, which was one of the main aspirations of the European Commission when launching the European Universities Initiative.

The beneficiaries of the EPICUR Campus

The EPICUR Campus is a central platform for:

• the EPICUR Alliance to offer flexible mobilities and minimize the administrative effort
• the EPICUR Universities to share courses and recognize effort
• the Professors to communicate with the EPICUR Students and deliver courses to them
• the Students to apply for and attend courses
• the Administrative staff to monitor mobilities …in a harmonized way.

The following figure is presenting the interaction inside the platform (Figure 2).

the team behind the development

For more details you can read the interview of Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos about the Campus

It is a rather big development team working in the context of WP4 (Pave the way for an Campus, using a student and staff centered approach). The team consists of the following members:

• Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos, WP4 Leader (AUTh), Dimitrios Karpouzos, ΑUTh Project Officer – PMT member (AUTh)
• Philip Hoyer, VCLP admin (KIT), Franziska Wandelmaier, VCLP admin & KIT admin for LMS connection to VCLP (KIT)
• Kyriakos Barbounakis, Dimitris Daskopoulos, Yiannis Salmatzidis, VURS development team (AUTh)
• Dorthe Hutz, VCLP landing page design and admin (ALU-FR)
• Angeliki Agorogianni, Vasiliki Kalfa, Thanos Koukoulis, AUTh admins for LMS connection to VCLP (AUTh)
• Adrian Trzoss, Przemek Kaszubski, admins for AMU LMS connection to VCLP (AMU)
• Marko Glaubitz, Nicole Wöhrle, admins for ALU-FR LMS connection to VCLP (ALU-FR)
• Claus Rainer Michalek, admin for BOKU LMS connection to VCLP (BOKU)
• Christophe Debeire, Celine Perves, admins for UNISTRA LMS connection to VCLP (UNISTRA)
• Bas Toeter, Koen Dekker, admin for UvA LMS connection to VCLP (UvA)
• Apostolos Papagiannakis, Apostolos Vavalas, AUTh Single-Sign-On (Shibboleth) admins (AUTh)
• Mikołaj Płaczek, AMU Single-Sign-On (Shibboleth) admins (AMU)
• Bernd Oberknapp, ALU-FR Single-Sign-On (Shibboleth) admins (ALU-FR)
• Gregor Weissmann, BOKU Single-Sign-On (Shibboleth) admins (BOKU)
• Michael Simon, KIT Single-Sign-On (Shibboleth) admins (KIT)

The above team is fully supported by the EPICUR WP2 Leader (Anouk Tso, UvA) and WP3 leaders (Steve Randall and Steffi Klose, ALU-FR). A special acknowledgment goes to Dimitrios Koveos, Vice Rector for Academic and Student Affairs of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), for his vision to implement VURS module and his continuous support.