ITALY

Connected Universities

Project members of the strategic partnership

EDUCatt, Esu Padova (regional agency for student services) and Fondazione Endisu are core partners of the project.

Institutional structure

Italy has been involved and committed to the implementation of the European Student Card project since April 2013 through a bilateral agreement between French and Italian Higer Education Intitutions. In 2014 Fondazione ENDISU developed “Piazza dello Studente”, a pilot platform for sharing student services among different institutions. At that time the project has been endorsed by Stefania Giannini, Italian Minister of Education, Universities and Research. In 2016 Italian and French Ministers of Education showed support for experimenting the ESC project.

Involved institutions

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
ACRU – Associazione Collegi e Residenze Universitarie
Fondazione CRUI

EDUCatt in the five Campuses of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore: Milano, Brescia, Piacenza e Cremona, Roma

EDUCatt will contribute to the experimentation phase of the ESC project in all the five campuses of Università Cattolica, both welcoming incoming students and sending outgoing students abroad.
Indeed, EDUCatt will test the real functioning of the ESC for the access to on campus services thanks to the identification of a small cohort of students coming from the universities “Universitat Rovira i Virgili Tarragona” in Spain and “Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg” in Germany.
Likewise, a cohort of outgoing students of Università Cattolica has been defined as well. These ones will spend a period abroad hosted by the universities “Universitat Rovira i Virgili Tarragona” in Spain, “Freie Universität Berlin” in Germany, “Universidade de Evora” in Portugal and “Aristotle University of Thessaloniki” in Greece.

All these students will be able to benefit in advance from the access to the services offered by the hosting institutions through a university card compatible with the ESC standards. To be compatible and enable the student recognition, the card must have the ESC hologram and QR code on it.

On the one hand, incoming students, showing their ESC, will be able to access the following facilities:

• Library of Università Cattolica: student owning a valid ESC will be given a temporary Wi-Fi password to access online resources that do not require a registration while on-campus and a printed barcode to access those spaces within the library area protected by turnstiles. Students who also provide the library service with some additional personal data will be registered in the libraries management system, which means they can access all available online resources, both on and off campus;
• Food service: incoming students only need to provide their ESC to get a ticket for a daily full meal in the canteens managed by EDUCatt at a reduced fare.
• Health care center: also in this case, incoming students have the right to generic medical consultations, only by providing their ESC.

On the other hand, outgoing students will be able to benefit in advance from their ESC in order to access on campus services, in accordance with what the hosting institutions will decide to offer.