One of the biggest barriers related to student mobility are the enormous uncertainties associated with the recognition of course achievements from partner universities and the risk of extended study periods.

How can ongoing transformation processes in higher education be used to further encourage (inter)national student mobility and which role can enhanced digital services play in this regard?

From a technical perspective, one of the answers could be to enhance the transparency of the recognition process and to provide students unrestricted access to their own data. The goal to offer these digital services to students is shared between PIM, the platform for international student mobility, and the DAAD IMKD project liveSciences³.

PIM was created with the aim of enabling full end to end digitization of inter-university data exchange for the use case of student mobility. This entails digitization of all processes associated with the recognition of academic achievements. Together with the liveSciences³ project, demands for different forms of mobility, including virtual mobility, are adjusted and implementation to further EU as well as non-EU partner universities are promoted.

These digitization procedures implicate the challenges of different levels of standardization in EU and national states and the requirements of today’s digitalization in higher education (Law for Digital Access (Onlinezugangsgesetz, OZG) and Erasmus Chart for Higher Education (ECHE)). Within the session we share insights into the digital transformation processes and their benefits for students and HEI. As a viable roadmap, we take you on an international and digital student journey by demonstrating the new core functionalities of PIM, including the recognition workflow and its history.

We invite you to discuss what PIM needs to consider in its exciting way from a project to a product and possible scenarios to encourage more students to (ad)venture their international student journey.