Lemmens The Virtual Challenge to International Cooperation in Higher Education Bernd Wächter (ed.) Aca papers on International Cooperation in Education The V irtual Challenge to International Cooperation in Higher Education

In search of conceptual middleware
IT terminology uses the expression “middleware” to describe software that
enables different systems, applications and databases to work together. I
believe that we also need a middleware to facilitate virtual education and vir-
tual mobility, i.e. some sort of political and organisational initiative and frame-
work that allows the heterogeneous educational sector to work together. This
middleware could be the glue that binds together top-down policy initiatives
like the “e-Europe” and “e-learning initiative” and the many innovative bottom-
up projects supported by programmes such as Socrates and Leonardo da
Vinci. A “virtual Erasmus” mobility scheme could be such an initiative. I hope
that the European Commission will seriously consider this option, as it
should look at the possibility of a “European Virtual University Gateway”
(EVU), a catalogue service labelling electronic courses and modules offered
across borders to students and institutions. In other words: a window on the
evolving e-learning in Europe. This could very well be linked up to national
initiatives and be in many ways designed similarly to the “European School-
net” (EUN) in the areas of primary and secondary education.
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The Erasmus programme, named after the renaissance scholar Erasmus of
Rotterdam, is one of the most successful and extensive mobility programmes
around, with about 100,000 mobile students a year, each staying for an aver-
age of five to six months at a university in another country. The ambition of
the EU is that one out of 10 students should spend a part of their studies at a
foreign institution during their studies. In 2000, less than three percent of all
students participated in the Erasmus scheme, and there is a discrepancy
between available places and the number of students participating in the pro-
gramme. The constraints for an expansion of physical mobility are probably
the additional costs of study abroad, as the Erasmus grants are very modest,
and students have to find additional sources of support to be able to take