The Greek Universities Network

The Greek Universities Network (GUnet) is a non-profit organisation with members all 25 public universities in Greece. GUnet’s mission is to promote, facilitate and coordinate the development and use of advanced information and communication technologies (ICT), services and applications in the Greek academic community for supporting the Greek higher education institutes in their mission. GUnet’s scope includes the following:

a) The coordination of the development and deployment of advanced ICT, services and applications for the Greek academic community.
b) The participation in R&D projects in the areas of ICT and e-learning technologies, services and applications aiming at maintaining the GUnet infrastructure and services at the state-of-the-art.
c) The collaboration with respective academic, research, and educational networks of other countries.

GUnet provides e-learning services to its members and its project partners through its Center for e-learning and Multimedia (mc.gunet.gr), the learning management system Open eClass (openeclass.org) and the rich media and lecture platform Open Delos (opendelos.org).  Since 2012, GUnet coordinates the development of opencourseware and open educational resources by its members, and it has developed and supports the national portal for open courses (opencourses.gr), which provides open access to more than 4.000 digital courses offered by 25 Greek Universities.  In 2016, GUnet was the recipient of the “Creative Innovation Award for Open Education Excellence“ awarded by the Open Education Consortium.

GUnet is running HARICA (Hellenic Academic and Research Institutions Certification Authority), which acts as a “Qualified” Trust Service Provider (QTSP). HARICA  participates in all major Global ‘ROOT CA’ Trust Programs (Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla), and operates as a ‘Trust Anchor’ in widely used application software and operating systems (Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Linux). HARICA is listed in the National Registry of QTSPs, and has also received a successful Conformance Assessment Report fulfilling the requirements of Regulation (EU) 910/2014 (also known as eIDAS) in the areas of “Qualified” electronic Signatures, Seals and Time Stamps.