The UNIVERSAL Exchange for Pan-European Higher Education will demonstrate the feasibility of an open exchange system for course units between institutions of higher education across Europe and elsewhere in the world. The system will embrace offers, enquiries, booking and actual delivery of course units. The aim is to develop and validate a model and standards that could later be widened to embrace other groups of higher education institutions and that could be transplanted into the market for training in industry, commerce and government.

The key innovation will be to create and manage an open market by introducing a brokerage platform with a standard way of describing the pedagogical, administrative and technical characteristics of course units. The system will enable institutions to enrich their curricula with remotely sourced material. It will be compatible with a variety of business models pursued by different institutions, including open universities and alliances between peer institutions. In addition, the common catalogue and continuous assessment mechanisms will enable institutions to selectively grant credits for course units delivered through UNIVERSAL. Students will thus benefit from a wider choice of course units within their own institutions and from virtual learner mobility between institutions.

The project will define the service elements needed to support an open exchange of course units. Different classes of course units will be covered, including live, person-to-person units and packaged, person-machine units. We will integrate existing technologies, including the results of earlier EU and national projects, to create a brokerage platform through which units can be offered, searched for, booked and assessed. It will be possible to link the brokerage system to a variety of delivery systems to control delivery and capture feedback. The project will test and demonstrate this by adapting a number of existing delivery systems to inter-work with the brokerage system. The delivery systems within the project will be only a sample of a range of possible systems that might be used for different classes of content, but they will be sufficient to prove the openness of the UNIVERSAL concept. The brokerage platform and delivery systems will exploit academic and commercial networks, including links with guaranteed quality of service.

We will carry out service trials with two groups of institutions: engineering schools and business schools. Trials will progressively link delivery systems to the brokerage platform and will include the use of complex pedagogical materials such as simulations and case studies. To make these trials possible we will seek out existing packaged content and live courses (the project will not create its own materials). The cataloguing of this material in the brokerage system will give us a pragmatic base to examine the problems of exchange standards and selective recognition for credits. Actual course content (as opposed to the catalogue entries) will remain with its originators within a distributed architecture. A marketing and dissemination activity will facilitate the acquisition of course units and the commitment of HE institutions to the exchange system. We will work with administrators, teachers and students to convince them of the value of participation and to help them to use the systems.

UNIVERSAL will address the needs of Action Line III.3.1 — Open Platforms and Tools for Personalised Learning. It will also address some of the needs of Action line III.3.2 - The Flexible University. The project will integrate a technical platform and use this to demonstrate the feasibility of creating an open exchange of course units between HE institutions. The demonstrations will focus on the needs of two groups of institutions: business schools and engineering schools. The participants will be business and engineering faculties, spread across Europe (including CEE/NIS countries), North America and Asia.

UNIVERSAL will overcome the limitations of bilateral agreements, or of agreements made within closed groups of institutions, whilst still allowing different institutions to pursue their chosen business models. The general aim is to develop and validate a model and standards for open exchange that could later be widened to embrace other groups of higher education institutions. UNIVERSAL will also investigate and promote the later take-up of this model in the field of industrial training, linking companies and educational institutions.

The participating institutions will use the additional course units made available through the open exchange to —

• offer a higher degree of specialisation and variety of approach to subjects of study, by mixing into local courses one or more units from other (remote) institutions;
• widen the choice of course units that can be chosen by students, e.g. some business school units open to engineering students;
• strengthen the learning experience as a result of interaction between students and teachers from different countries and backgrounds.

UNIVERSAL will facilitate co-operation between the faculties of the respective institutions, to ensure that the quality of remotely delivered course units is recognised and accepted as valid by the receiving institutions. UNIVERSAL will develop quality controls and operational standards to achieve this, (i) on the supply side of the brokerage platform, in the offering and registration of course units and (ii) on the demand side, in the selection and booking of these by receiving institutions (see B5 — Innovation). All this will promote EU-wide acceptance by institutions.

We will develop recommendations for mutual recognition of course units, based on our standard catalogue and quality controls. If adopted by institutions this will facilitate EU-wide acceptance by students and ultimately promote the virtual mobility of students.

All of the remotely delivered course units will be interactive, in either the person-machine or the person-to-person sense. To maximise the pedagogic value of remote person-to-person interactions we will develop "best practice" guidelines and will offer special course units to improve human language, presentation and moderation skills. All course units will be supervised, as it is not our aim to promote a de-personalised learning environment. UNIVERSAL will incorporate continuous assessment of content and platforms resulting from the delivery of course units. This will be fed back to the brokerage platform so as to improve the information available to teachers and administrators and to promote acceptance of the overall system.

The brokerage platform will use de facto Internet standards. This will make it inherently accessible Europe-wide (a) by any institution, for offers, enquiries and booking and (b) by students for enquiries and feedback. The delivery platforms tested in the project will also conform to established standards where these are suitable for the classes of content. All the software will be mountable on PC-level hardware and operating systems. The networking elements of the delivery systems, especially the network links with QoS, will follow practices and procedures proven by other EU-wide R&D projects. All this will also contribute to EU-wide accessibility.

UNIVERSAL will contribute to a broad movement in Higher Education (HE) and in industry and commerce towards mass- and life-long learning. It will do this through:

The technology that will be used to meet these requirements will be ubiquitous, opening the possibility of common, portable solutions and of large-scale, shared, cross-border systems. UNIVERSAL will help to build a Europe-wide consensus about common solutions.

UNIVERSAL will build upon the results of previous projects and on-going research, including:

• ELECTRA project between Aachen, Liege, and Maastricht.
• MESO European project (4FP).
• CISAER project (European Leonardo da Vinci programme).
• ARIADNE
• ICE-CAR security services
• Current work on educational metadata in IEEE
• STRATSIMNET at HEC Montréal..

See also references under Activity 4.3.

The key innovation in UNIVERSAL will be the creation of an open, cross-border, educational market environment coupling brokerage and delivery of "live" and "packaged" courses. The proposed framework will accommodate and add value to the various business models and course structures employed in European HE institutions. Firstly, it will give institutions extended resources (Fig. 1), for example, enabling —

• a single faculty wishing to experiment with the simple import of external material to enrich a specific course,
• an existing alliance between institutions to make their exchange more efficient and to enrich it with types of course units not previously exchanged,
• an Open University to extend the range and depth of its courses.

Secondly, thanks to the common catalogue and standard quality and assessment mechanisms of UNIVERSAL, it will be easier for alliances to be extended so that there are larger pools of shared resources (Fig. 2). Thirdly, the same common mechanisms will make it easier for institutions to mutually recognise remotely sourced course units and grant credits for them (Fig. 3). This in turn will widen student choice and promote virtual learner mobility.

In short, UNIVERSAL will show the way forward from the present system of "barter" within closed groups towards a more open, market-oriented exchange of course units between institutions across Europe.

Fig. 1 Extended resource pools

Fig. 2 Extended alliance and shared resource pool

Fig. 3 Mutual recognition for credits

To achieve our goal of open exchange we will also innovate in two other areas:

• the design and implementation of a generic and flexible brokerage system that accommodates the various academic, legal, regulatory and financial conditions attached by HE institutions to course units;
• the development and testing of "on-line" evaluation mechanisms for monitoring learning progress in "live" and "packaged" courses, and the use of such mechanisms to (a) guide/adapt "on-line" course delivery processes and (b) provide a quality assurance dimension to the brokerage service.

The UNIVERSAL brokerage platform will be an interactive hypermedia environment that aids academics and administrators in course planning and selection. It will de-couple offers and sourcing of course units on the supply side from enquiry, booking and delivery on the demand side. The critical developments to enable this de-coupling will be a catalogue and supporting processes, with a language ("EduXML") that adequately describes all the properties of course units.

The UNIVERSAL system will employ a series of "off-line" and "on-line" evaluation instruments ranging from questionnaires to computer-aided assessment scores [Ref. 1, 7 ]. Innovation here will consist of continuously feeding course unit evaluation results back into the brokerage platform. When combined with other statistical information such as course unit enquiries, offers and usage, this will open new possibilities for open, transparent quality assurance by the users on a Europe-wide basis.