In April 2025, the QualityLink consortium published a set of draft technical specifications.

What is our aim?

The QualityLink project aims to create an open, reliable and scalable ecosystem for quality data on micro-credentials and other courses.

We want to allow higher education institutions and other education providers to expose basic data on their micro-credentials, study programmes and other courses using open and interoperable standards. We also want to enable other data providers to publish data on these courses in open formats.

We will pilot aggregation of all data published by higher education institutions and others into a Europe-wide dataset that will be openly available through a web portal and an API.

What are the benefits for higher education institutions?

• Europe-wide visibility: all information on courses exposed in an interoperable format will become part of a Europe-wide dataset and be visible in a Europe-wide platform of course/learning opportunities.
• Recognition: reliable and open data can help credential evaluators in other education institutions or employers to better understand your micro-credentials.
• European University alliances: you can use the Europe-wide QualityLink dataset to power your alliance’s joint course catalogue if your member higher education institutions expose their data.
• Benchmarking: as a higher education institution you can use the aggregate dataset to compare your offer with other education providers.

What specifications do we propose?

Our initial thoughts on a technical architecture were summarised in a Concept Paper published in early 2025. Based on this, we drafted the following specifications:

• The Data Sources and Access Policy sets out terms and conditions under which data would be aggregated and made available.
• The Ontology extends the European Learning Model (ELM) and its application profile for Learning Opportunities and Qualifications (LOQ). It adds additional properties that were identified as useful for specific uses cases, e.g. within European University alliances.
• The Course Identifier Specification proposes a common format for unique course identifiers that could be used across different data standards and systems.
• The Data Source Discovery Specification describes a mechanism how the aggregator will automatically discover data sources exposed by higher education institutions and other data providers. In particular, it describes how higher education institutions can make use different interoperable formats and how their data can be found without separate registration formalities.
• The Data Exchange Specification describes in detail the formats in which education providers and others can make data available for aggregation and addresses issues such as incremental transport and authentication. The specification allows the use of ELM, OOAPI, Edu-API and OCCAPI currently.

Who do these specification address?

The specifications address primarily higher education institutions that consider exposing their catalogues of learning opportunities in an interoperable format.

The specifications are also relevant for European University alliances. Alliances may use the described approach for their joint course catalogue. In the future, alliances could use the QualityLink aggregator and dataset to feed their joint course catalogues.

In addition, these specification might be of interest to other data providers that maintain data on micro-credentials or courses, as well as to potential users of aggregate data.

How to provide feedback?

All source files of the specifications are hosted in the GitHub repository Knowledge-Innovation-Centre/quality-link-specs.

You can provide feedback by:

• creating an issue on GitHub,
• making a pull request if you have a specific suggestion,
• filling the form below, or
• emailing to colin@knowledgeinnovation.eu.