The usability aspects of an universal brokerage and delivery system for the pan-European higher education

The paper gives a short overview of a recently launched European Union project (UNIVERSAL) for universal exchange of university course units for European higher education based on a brokerage and delivery system model. The basic components and characteristics of the approach are described. The UNIVERSAL brokerage platform is an interactive hypermedia environment offered to the academics and administrators of European educational institutions to plan and select courses. It decouples offers and course units provision on the supply side from enquiry, booking and delivery on the demand side. The most important element that enable this decoupling is the catalogue of offered educational material and the supporting processes, that adequately describes all the properties, educational and technological of the course units.