In-house software

If you are using your own in-house built mobility management software, connecting it with the Erasmus Without Paper Network will allow you to communicate with other systems, so that you can send and receive student information as data into your system. Furthermore, you will be able to connect to the Erasmus Mobility Tool+ via connecting to the Erasmus Without Paper Network.

Step-by-step

As a first step it is important to understand the basics (different scenario's for joining EWP, the mobility process cut into pieces) of the EWP infrastructure and apply it to the management of mobility processes at your own institution.

The implementation of EWP will need to be done by your IT team and therefore we encourage you to involve them in the process right from the beginning. They will be responsible for developing the APIs that connect your own system to the system of your partner via the EWP network using the communication protocols.

Your IT team will have two important tasks:

They have to connect your in-house software to the Erasmus Without Paper Network. This is a mainly technical task and there is a lot of documentation available on how to connect. You can redirect them to the EWP developers page and a special Github repository;
The existing business processes will need to be redesigned once data can be directly exchanged with the partners. This is a task where both the IT-team and the IRO (as business process owners) should be involved (also see step 5).

As a first step some basic APIs should be implemented by your IT team (the so-called Primary Network APIs: Echo, Institutions, Organizational Units).
As a second step it is important to align the developments with the timeline from the European Commission and the National Agencies. In spring 2021 it was announced that HEIs need to be connected to the EWP Network and need to start exchanging Online Learning Agreements and Inter-Institutional Agreements with their partners through the EWP network from June 2021. They should be connected at the very latest before the start of the academic year 2022/2023. In order to make sure that no one is left behind, the Commission will consider the 2021/2022 academic year as a transitional year.

The full entry procedure is described in another part of the EWP Knowledge Base. You will have to send a mail to valere.meus(at)uni-foundation.eu to start the process.

The first concrete step is to send the URL of your manifest file. It will then be entered in the so-called development environment so you can start testing.

Although your IT team will be responsible for connecting your system to EWP, you will need to rethink existing business processes because you will need functionality to send data to your partner institutions or handle data that you receive from your partner. We strongly advise that the IRO as a business process owner is directly involved in the rethinking of these processes.

If you have a development/testing environment available, you can identify some partners to test the EWP data exchanges with your partner. An overview of which APIs are supported by your partners can be found in the EWP development registry: https://dev-registry.erasmuswithoutpaper.eu/coverage

Once the basic APIs have been implemented and tested, you can be added to the production environment and officially accepted as an EWP partner.

You are now ready to start exchanging data with your partners in a digital format.

Since the Network was launched in 2018, all the APIs have been finetuned and now HEIs can connect their student information systems to enable the exchange of information such as:

Institutional information
Courses
Inter-institutional Agreements
Nomination of mobilities
Transcripts of Records
Access to Mobility Tool+ data dictionaries
Learning Agreements

Find out how to join Erasmus Without Paper.

State of play of the EWP APIs

The first quarter of 2021 has seen significant work on the EWP APIs, which was carried out under the aegis of the EDSSI project. During the second half of 2021 EWP APIs stayed rather stable. Software developers were busy with implementation to keep deadlines imposed by the European Comission for IIAs and LAs. However, some changes are planned for the first quarter of 2022. Small corrections will be made in IIAs and LAs, more substantial changes can be expected in Factsheet API and OMobilities API (related to the nomination procedure). Also the structure of the network will change which might impact your provider.

In May 2021 flowcharts describing mobility processes have been upgraded to fully cover changes in specifications. In June 2021 use cases and scenarios for LAs and IIAs have been posted in GitHub.

The info below summarises the current state of play and planned developments. It is important to share this information with your IT-team/technical provider so they can plan their developments accordingly. It will be updated every half a year (next update: March 2022).

Inter-institutional agreement

Version 5 of the API was published on March 5, 2021 to ensure alignment with the new official template, published on January 29 2021 for the 2021-2027 period. Version 6 was published on March 15, 2021 to incorporate a request from the EWP community to allow changes in contacts without the need to resign the agreement. Small technical update has been done on March 29, 2021; the latest version is 6.0.1 which is backward compatible with 6.0.0.

To support the whole process, the IIA Approval API version 1 should be supported as well.

In first quarter of 2022 we plan to make mobilities per year element in IIA API required to align specification with the final version of the IIA template. EQF element will remain optional as it is optional in the template (some developers wanted to have it mandatory).

All versions of the IIA API previous to 6.0.1 and 6.0.0 are deprecated and will soon be announced as discontinued.

Learning agreements

The learning agreement API was updated on March 10, 2021 to ensure compliance with the official template published on February 9th 2021 for the 2021-2027 period. Small backward compatible update was done on March 26, 2021. The latest stable version is 1.0.1.

No further updates of this API are envisaged for the coming 6 months; all versions previous to 1.0.0 are discontinued.

Nomination

An updated specification of the nominations API (the so called Outgoing mobilities API) is provisionally scheduled for the first quarter of 2022. ESI will become mandatory, to match it with the required ESI in LA.

Transcripts of records

An updated specification of the API for Transcript of Records (Incoming TOR APIs) is provisionally scheduled for the first quarter of 2022. It will differ in one additional comment saying that in the EWP context ESI (coming from ELMO describing details of ToR) is required.

Manifest files

Substantial technical upgrade is planned for the structure of the manifest files. The main reason for that is to give HEIs full control over their presence in the EWP Network. This is a first step towards the deployment of the Registration Portal which is under development. After the change each manifest file will cover only one HEI. This change is technical, will influence implementations supporting nodes with many HEIs. Some changes may be also taken into account by providers of in-house systems, making their implementation simpler. It will not impact any mobility business process.