2.3.10 EducaNext 

Lead 

Consortium of HE Institutions (See below)  

Origin 

Austria (European Partners) 

Background 

EducaNext is an academic exchange portal service supporting the creation and sharing of knowledge for 

Higher Education. It is open to any member of the academic or research community.  

The EducaNext portal resides in a distributed multi lingual, web based, learning content management system, 

called the Universal Brokerage Platform (UBP). Built from open source components, the UBP was developed 

and is currently maintained by the UNIVERSAL consortium, who include: RWTH Aachen (De), BearingPoint 

Infonova (At), BIT: Bureau for International Research and Technology Cooperation (At), Eidgenossische 

Technische Hochschule (Ch), Hautes Etudes Commerciales (Fr), Hellenic Open University (Gr), Helsinki 

University of Technology (Fi), Iceland Telecom (Is), Institut Jozef Stefan (Si), Institut National des 

Telecommunications (INT, Fr), NCSR Demokritos (Gr), T Systems Nova GmbH (De), Universidad Politecnica 

de Madrid (Es), Universite Libre de Bruxelles (Be), University of Cyprus (Cy), University of Lancaster (UK), 

Wirtschaftsuniversitat Wien (At), Warsaw University of Technology(Pl).  

EducaNext has been continuously evaluated against its objective. From these evaluations the following 

conclusions can be drawn: 

Content is key. One primary motivation for using a portal like EducaNext is to get access to a wide 

variety of high quality knowledge resources.  

Community is important. It serves as glue between the knowledge media and its user, reducing user 

fluctuations and providing an audience for  representative measures  such as giving knowledge away for 

free to a large audience.  

Usability of the software tools must be high. In the ideal world knowledge media are information 

systems, which require zero learning time. Usability has many aspects, usability of the navigation 

design, screen design aesthetics, labelling of concepts and commands, workflow usability, system 

performance and reliability. 

URL 

http://www.educanext.org/ubp 

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