By Mikkel Hald, 16/03/26
University College UCN has gained access to the virtual campus of the HEROES university alliance, of which UCN is a member. The virtual campus is registered in the German identity federation DFN-AAI and shared internationally from there through eduGAIN, enabling UCN users to access the service via WAYF using their established institutional identities.
This also means that UCN has not had to carry out any separate single-sign-on integration with the virtual campus, nor will it need to spend resources maintaining such an integration in the future: the integration already was in place through UCN’s participation in the WAYF community and thereby in eduGAIN.
The virtual campus is the shared digital platform of the HEROES alliance. The platform is intended to bring together joint courses, learning programmes, collaboration tools and connections between the partner institutions in a single digital environment.
HEROES stands for Higher Education for Resilience-Oriented and Empowered Societies. The alliance is part of the EU’s European Universities initiative and consists of nine practice-oriented higher education institutions from Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Lithuania, Portugal and the Czech Republic. The aim is to strengthen smart regional resilience through education, applied research and cooperation with regions and businesses.
This is a good example of WAYF and eduGAIN making it easier for Danish institutions to participate in international collaborations and use shared digital resources across national borders — doing away with the need to establish local integrations from scratch each time.