The Unite! Metacampus moves to beta phase

Tests of the Unite! Metacampus, led by the team at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC), were carried out with real participants (students and teachers) in the context of internal Unite! events, such as the 1st Spring School on Energy 2021, organised by Politecnico di Tornino (PoliTO), three courses within the Teaching and Learning Academy (Getting started with Project Based Learning, Case-Based Teaching and How to face Entrepreneurship Education) and the upcoming Boot Camp II.

The alpha phase was useful to centralise information about courses and activities, as well as to organise registrations for Unite! initiatives, user-profile personalisation for networking, and the initial issuing of Open Badges for some of these courses. From the technical point of view, tests about Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) integration have been carried out, with the valuable support from Grenoble INP-UGA. LTI integration means that the staff and students can access the course transparently through the Metacampus, while the course is in fact offered and hosted by the corresponding Unite! partner university.

The beta phase implies that the Metacampus is ready for offering those courses and initiatives that the Unite! ecosystem requires. This beta phase will focus on testing the next steps for the platform. Metacampus is ready to start integration with eduGAIN for distributed authentication. The eduGAIN interfederation service connects identity federations around the world, simplifying access to content, services and resources for the global research and education community. This means that staff and students can access resources with a unique user and password (single-sign-on).

Apart from additional courses and programs, the Metacampus will implement solutions for the needs of the Unite! partners, such as the Unite! Student4Future co-creation initiative, the Open Badges system, and a thesis-proposal catalogue.