Supporting Student Mobility and Lifelong Learning
CSC – IT Center for Science, together with three Finnish higher education institutions, is developing a DS4Skills use case that connects student information systems to the European Skills Data Space. The ultimate goal is to make learning opportunities across European universities easier to discover, reduce manual data handling, and improve data quality through AI-powered classification – supporting both student mobility and lifelong learning.
The European Skills Data Space is an EU initiative to make skills-related data easier to find and use across Europe. It is one of many sectoral data spaces currently being set up in Europe, following the European Data Strategy and legislation stemming from this.
The DS4Skills project builds upon earlier projects that have laid the foundations of the Skills Data Space. The aim is to put those foundations into use by building eight practical and sustainable use cases.
CSC-led use case
CSC – IT Center for Science has received funding within the DS4Skills project for the implementation of one of these use cases together with three Finnish higher education institutions (HEIs): Tampere University, Metropolia University of Applied Sciences and University of Jyväskylä.
The use case focuses on supporting the HEIs with their long-term goals of sharing learning data in Europe. The first step in achieving this is to connect the student information systems with the Skills Data Space. Finnish HEIs are currently using two different such systems, Peppi and Sisu.
CSC is a Finnish state-owned company providing world-class ICT services for research, education, culture, and public administration. In the DS4Skills project, CSC coordinates the Finnish use case, enabling the HEIs to test and implement the data space in Finland.
Using data space services
Prometheus-X, a key player in establishing the Skills Data Space, has developed an open-source component called Prometheus-X Data Space Connector (PDC), which will be used to connect the Finnish HEIs with the Skills Data Space.
PDC handles things like checking digital contracts between data product providers and users as well as making sure the data subjects have given consent to use their data for a specified purpose. These are key aspects of the European data spaces and the broader European data strategy, where the goal is to enable innovative use of data but respect European laws and values.
Added value for students and higher education
When the student information systems have been connected to the data space, HEIs can start making use of data products within the data space and make their own data available for others to use. Potential applications could include:
- Finnish HEIs can make their own learning offer data available, enabling alliance partners to read the data automatically. And vice versa, Finnish HEIs can make use of such data from elsewhere in Europe.
- HEIs can use AI-based data services in the data space to enrich their own data. For example, they can add ESCO classification (European Classification of Skills/Competences, Qualifications and Occupations) to their course descriptions.
- Students’ learning achievements could be used to build a digital profile of their skills. This digital profile can then be matched with other data available in the data space, for example European employment data, providing insight into valuable skills for the student to learn.
Not all of these applications will be implemented within CSC’s use case of the DS4Skills project. The main goal at this stage is to integrate the connectors into HEI systems and demonstrate their functionality in a simple way, possibly the ESCO classification of the learning offer.
This is, however, the first step towards sustainable solutions within the Skills Data Space and data sharing in higher education – supporting mobility and lifelong learning in Europe.
Authors: Olli Lyytinen, Jukka Kohtanen, and Annika Mauno (CSC)
🔵 Visit the project website: www.skillsdataspace.eu for the latest news and events.
🔵 Join our community on LinkedIn (@DS4Skills – Data Space for Skills) & YouTube (@skillsdataspace)