The European Student Identifier (ESI) is a digital identifier enabling students to uniquely identify themselves when they access student mobility services online; the ESI supports and eases international student mobility and transnational cooperation of higher education institutions.
ESI in practice
A first use case where students can identify themselves using ESI, is the digital European Student Card in the Erasmus App.
Although ESI is merely a technical solution, it is a very powerful one for IROs. It will allow IT-systems to link information shared via EWP to the right student without a need for any human manual intervention. For example, when the home university nominates a student digitally via EWP the ESI will be included in the information send to the host institution. When the host institution than receives a Learning Agreement ESI will enable linking this LA to the right nominated student. At the end of the mobility, a Transcript of Records will be send digitally from the host to the home institution and once again ESI will be used to identify the student at the home university.
An article on how to deploy ESI at your institution can be found here and here.
Making the European Student Identifier available as an attribute is a task where the IT team of the university needs to be involved. The technical information can be found at the Géant Wiki with information about the European Student Identifier.