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European Student Card Initiative

Part of the Erasmus+ programme

How Erasmus Without Paper works

The main principle behind EWP is that, as a higher education institution, you maintain your existing system for managing student mobility and connect this to the EWP network.

Instead of printing a PDF or a paper copy of a document such as an Inter-Institutional agreement or a Learning Agreement, you will be able to:

  • approve the documents you need online
  • send them directly via your own management system to your partner institution
  • ask your partner institution to digitally approve them

What this means for how you manage your mobilities

An Erasmus+ mobility entails a whole set of processes that require communication between the sending (or home) HEI and the receiving (or host) HEI.

While this process can vary, in general it works as follows:

  1. an HEI signs an Erasmus+ institutional agreement
  2. a sending HEI nominates the student at the receiving HEI
  3. a Learning agreement is established and signed by three parties (student, sending HEI, receiving HEI) before departure
  4. the student arrives at the receiving HEI, who needs to confirm the date of arrival
  5. in case of changes to the Learning agreement these need to be signed by three parties (student, sending HEI, receiving HEI)
  6. the student departs the receiving HEI, who needs to confirm the date of departure
  7. the receiving HEI sends Transcript of Records to the sending HEI

The EWP will come in to play for each of the steps that require communication (or data exchanges) between the sending HEI and the receiving HEI.

The processes above are gradually being transferred into technical so-called APIs (Application Programming Interface) that facilitate system-to-system communication. These will allow administrators to manage their part of the process in their own system while interacting with the EWP network whenever confirmation/approval/signatures are needed from a partner.