E-participation in higher education: The importance of non-technical factors as identified in the EU-project MyUniversity

Many higher education institutes and universities are involved in beyond borders decision making processes. These activities accelerated after Bologna process agreement. E-participation not only covers the general participation of citizens, but also enables higher education decision makers to communicate with each other and with all stakeholders within the university. During more than ten years the EU has funded projects in the area of e-democracy and e-participation in order to respond to this emerging requirement. The aim of some of these projects has been to equip universities with e-participation tools or platforms. There have been some EU projects that turned out to become great successes while some other projects have not been particularly useful. Lots of studies have been published about these projects and the core ideas behind them. But they have mainly covered technical aspects and less about non-technical challenges such as socio-cultural differences, rules and regulations and challenges related to unifying different decision making processes. In the present study an attempt has been made to identify the non-technical factors which have an impact for the success of e-participation in higher education. The EU-funded project MyUniversity has been selected as a case study. It involved 17 higher institutions in Europe. Data collection was conducted by means of recorded semi structured interviews with stakeholders of the MyUniversity project. Data-analysis was done using a systematic coding of audio flies using the Nvivo software and based on grounded theory principles. The emerging main categories of non-technical factors identified by interpreting data have been the major contribution of this study. The study clearly demonstrates that non-technical factors were very influential in the MyUniversity project. The following nontechnical factors were identified as crucial for the success of e-participation in higher education: 1) The socio-cultural context, 2) Identification of users, 3) Usability, drivers and motivation. The study showed that deeper needs assessments locally at each university and "cultural studies" are very crucial and should not be neglected, even though conducting them for every single involved country or institution are both budget and time consuming. Moreover, each educational institute should use its own motivational techniques based on their cultural studies in order to involve their users. This study concludes that the "business strategies" used by EU for introducing e-participation projects in higher education in EU countries need to be revised taking into account the identified issues.