XHEIE (XHigherEducationInstitutionExchange) - What is it?

XHEIE is a standardisation project of the state of Saxony-Anhalt and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

The goal is to standardise student data exchange in the national higher education system so that the necessary interoperability between higher education institution systems (called Campus Management Systems) can be established for the media-consistent processing of future digital administrative services. To this end, a procedure that has been tried and tested in other standardisation projects can be found here and is described as follows:

a) A standardisation strategy is developed and coordinated

b) The Standardisation requirements are formulated and submitted to the German IT Planning Council (33rd meeting) 

c) Together with higher education institutions, ministries of science of the federal states, manufacturers of specialised procedures and other stakeholders, the requirements for standardisation were collected in the project's internal ticket system.

d) The processing of the requirement is provided iteratively in the form of a publicly accessible specification with PDF documentation and machine-processable files (XSD, XML).

To improve connectivity to others, especially international systems, domestic and foreign efforts are taken into account, and information about the work of XHEIE is provided within the framework of the standardisation dependent and parallel running projects are also designed in a coordinated manner. As an example, a virtual workshop with the EU Commission took place on September 9, 2020.

As a result, a specification will be drawn up to provide higher education institutions with information on how data communication between higher education institutions is regulated. The specification is in the digitisation context so that it is no longer the students but the data that runs from higher education institutions to higher education institutions. 

The basis for this project is the Online Access Act (DE: Onlinezugangsgesetz) (short: OZG), which came into force in August 2017. The OZG obliges all German public authorities and higher education institutions to digitally offer their administrative services to citizens and students by the end of 2022. These administrative services, which must be implemented by German higher education institutions, can be viewed on the OZG information platform.