Towards SDGR-Compliant Cross-Border Education Services

Learners face various challenges when accessing online cross-border education services, e.g. when enrolling at foreign universities or applying for scholarships abroad. Challenges include the non-recognition of identification means and difficulties in providing and validating paper evidence. The EU project DE4A has addressed these challenges by implementing and validating the once-only principle across borders in the context of the European Union. This paper describes the infrastructure developed, the educational services improved and integrated into the infrastructure, the user experiences of the students from Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain who used these services, and various lessons learnt from the analysis, design, customisation, integration, and testing. Students appreciated the duration of the improved procedures, the control in managing their own credentials, the security and privacy protection, and the effort required. The improved procedures also benefit educational institutions, which can save considerable time in processing student information, particularly in the validation of higher education diplomas, by obtaining accurate and reliable student data in electronic format. Collaboration between several institutions from Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain has shown that the secure, high-quality, and user-centric cross-border exchange of evidence for online higher education procedures brings tangible benefits that will greatly facilitate student mobility in Europe and reduce the administrative burden.