About the EUNIS Elite Award
The purpose of the EUNIS Elite Award is to recognize and promote best practice in some aspect of the use of information systems in higher education in Europe. The competition is intended to:
- recognize excellence
- stimulate wider awareness and use of information systems in research, administration and community service in institutions
- encourage best practice
Submissions for the Award may come from any area related to information systems, including for example: Portals, Identity Management, Administrative Information Systems.
Judging criteria
| Judging Criteria | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Pedagogy/Business goals | The project must show it is aligned with the institution’s key business goals. |
| Innovation/Imagination | An implementation of the project must have taken place and the ways in which it is innovative and different should be described. Imagination can include creative solutions to common problems or long term vision. |
| Benefits | The project must show evidence of demonstrable benefits to the target community. Types of evidence to show benefits achieved might include: case studies; institutional performance indicators; internal and external evaluations; student feedback and focus groups; system logs or other statistics and anecdotal evidence from both students and staff. For the Elite award, evidence of efficiency and productivity gains is important. |
| Transferability | The submission should consider the extent to which the project can be easily repeated, and deliver benefits, in other institutional contexts. |
| Collaboration | The submission should outline how collaborative working has benefited the project; this can be between students and staff, between different departments, inter-institutional. |
| Technology | The technology/ies used can be proprietary, open source, cloud or self-developed, but the choice of technology must be explained and show how this technology gives added value in this context. For the Elite award, evidence of a high level of technological integration is important. |
Rules for submission
All regular Members of EUNIS are eligible to compete for the Elite Award for Excellence, including institutions in national organizations in membership of EUNIS. Only one entry per institution will be accepted.
Entries can include in-house developments, collaborative developments, open source, commercial or cloud solutions. There must be clear evidence of original and imaginative use of the technology by the institution making the submission. A member of the winning team must register to attend the Congress to present their work.
The submission document for the Elite Award should describe:
- The goals of the project
- The environment in which the project takes place, including technical, administrative and financial constraints
- The results of the project and its impact on the institution
- The state of development of the project
- Any planned further developments
- The applicability of the project to other institutions
A brief summary of the project is also required.
Submission procedure
A full paper submission for the EUNIS Congress (within the call for papers) is requested. A panel of senior reviewers is appointed by the president of EUNIS. The appointments will avoid any conflict of interest. This Elite Award jury panel will choose a winner among the candidate papers for the Elite Award, submitted through the regular EUNIS congress reviewing process.
The EUNIS board members cannot enter the Elite Award. The winner(s) of an Elite Award in the last three years cannot submit a further entry for the Elite Award.
Award
The winner(s) will receive a certificate and will be invited to present at the Congress.The winner(s) may also be featured in other publicity and/or events.
Award Winners
2024 Elite Awards for the best practice of the use of information systems in HE went to:
- Main Elite Award: Marius Politze, Benedikt Heinrichs, Sirieam Hunke, Ilona Lang and Thomas Eifert from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, for FAIR Digital Objects: FAIRtilizer for the Digital Harvest (link to the session and abstract).
- Lasting Achievement: Janina Mincer-Daszkiewicz, University of Warsaw, Poland, for Success story – 25 years of digitalization of higher education institutions in Poland (link to the session and abstract).
- Honourable mention: Giorgios Roussos, Dimos Charidimou, Anastasios Petalotis and Angeliki Agorogianni from Aristotle University Thessaloniki, Greece, for Building a Sustainable, Energy-Efficient, and Secure European University using LoRaWAN: Protect your Digital Ecosystem and Enjoy! (link to the session and abstract).
- Honourable mention: Emil Podwysocki, Maria Bylina, Jacek Raczko, Michał Ulaniuk, Marek Michajłowicz and Rafał Jendrzejewski from the National Information Processing Institute, Poland, for Ludzie Nauki: Data aspects of the Polish national CRIS (link to the session and abstract).
2023 – Elite Award for the best practice of the use of information systems in HE went to: Anna Åhnberg and Mattias Sällström from the the LADOK Consortium for the paper A collaboration between 40+ government agencies to drive development and efficiency in higher education in Sweden.
2022 – Using enterprise architecture and capability models in higher education: case studies from the EUNIS community by Valérie Le Strat (AMUE, France), Patrik Maltusch (Aalto University, Finland), Esa Suominen (University of Helsinki, Finland), Lluís Alfons Ariño Martín (Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Spain).
2021 – Progress on Digitization of Higher Education Processes towards Standards EU & DE: Status and future Perspectives, by Guido Bacharach, Matthias Gottlieb, Jan Joost Norder, Hans Pongratz, Ramona-Denisa Steiper, Wolfgang Radenbach, Hermann Strack and Arn Waßmann.
2020 – no award
2019 EUNIS Elite Award for excellence in implementing Information Systems for Higher Education winner is the paper: Implementing an Opensource Higher Education and Research ERP at the scale of a country or State. Case Study : The Malian Higher Education Information System, by Jean Marc Coris, Stuart Mclellan from Cocktail Office and RENATER (French NREN), France.
2018 EUNIS Elite Award for excellence in implementing Information Systems for Higher Education winner is the paper: POL-on: The Information System of Science and Higher Education in Poland, by Marek Michajłowicz, Marta Niemczyk, Jarosław Protasiewicz, Karolina Mroczkowska from National Information Processing Institute, Poland.
2017 EUNIS Elite Award for excellence in implementing Information Systems for Higher Education winner was the paper: DABAR – the national infrastructure for digital repositories, by Draženko Celjak, Zoran Bekić, Marko Cundeković, Ljiljana Jertec, Miroslav Milinović and Alen Zubić from SRCE – University of Zagreb.
2016 EUNIS Elite Award for excellence in implementing Information Systems for Higher Education winner was the paper: Interoperability between Information Systems of Portuguese Higher Education Institutions, by Lígia M. Ribeiro (Universidade do Porto), Rui H. Pereira (Instituto Politécnico do Porto), Osvaldo Pacheco (Universidade de Aveiro), Mário Bernardes (Universidade de Coimbra), Ricardo T. Martins (Universidade de Aveiro).
2015 EUNIS Elite Award for excellence in implementing Information Systems for Higher Education winner was: University of Münster and University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany), “sciebo — the Campus cloud for NRW” by Raimund Vogl et al.
2014 EUNIS Elite Award for excellence in implementing Information Systems for Higher Education winner is: Manchester Metropolitan University (UK): Transforming the Student Experience: Manchester Metropolitan University’s EQAL Project, by Mark Stubbs
Previous Winners
2013: University of Porto and FCCN Portugal
2012 : Waterford Institute of Technology (Ireland)
2011: AlmaLaurea Interuniversity Consortium (Italy)
2008 to 2010: no award
2007: MUCI Consortium (Poland)
2006: Universitat Jaume I Castello (Spain)
2005: Masaryk University Brno (Czech Republic)
2004: University of Manchester (UK)
2003: Technische Universität Graz (Austria)
2002: London School of Economics (UK)
2001: Helsinki University of Technology (Finland) and University of Porto (Portugal)
2000: no award