The EU Commission invested considerably in the development of the European Student Card Initiative as a key means to implement and realise the European Educational Area by 2025.
The European Student Card (ESC), one of the building blocks of the Initiative, provides for a consolidated and reliable mechanism for students’ authentication, exchange of students’ data and interoperability among EU Higher Education Institutions (HEI) to guarantee access to students’ services to streamline and facilitate mobility.
Starting from that vision and realizing that a major factor of resistance to the adoption of the European Student Card (ESC) is the lack of awareness among students in Europe about the potential of the card and its benefits, there is a need to act on the end-users of ESC promoting a bottom-up approach to foster its adoption and use among students.
This is the background that led to the development of ESC-tension 2 – Accelerating ESC Adoption in the EEA, a EU-funded project that aims to promote the adoption of ESC by acting mainly on students.
ESC-tension 2 represents the development of the previous project ESC-tension, coordinated as well by ENDISU Foundation. Thanks to that, a multilingual platform has been set up to provide new operational tools for HEIs to facilitate the harmonisation of university cards with ESC standards, and for Student Service Providers to make student services ESC-friendly.
Therefore, while with the first project the challenge was directed towards the institutional and organisational aspects of universities and SSPs for the adoption of ESC, ESC-tension 2 project addresses operational challenges towards the awareness of the potential, benefits and functionality of ESC among students.
ESC-tension 2 will develop a series of materials that plan to raise students’ awareness of the potential of ESC, providing training packages and operational tools that guide and encourage students in their concrete use of ESC.
The duration of the project is of 30 months, from November 2023 to April 2026 and its partners are the following: the project coordinator Fondazione ENDISU (Italy), ISIC – the International Student Identity Card Association (Denmark), Normandie Université (France), Universidade de Aveiro (Portugal), ECCA – the European Campus Card Association (Ireland) and ESN – the Erasmus Student Network (Belgium).
