Education Office Newsletter - December 2015

Contents
• HR
• Ordinance on Admission to EPFL
• Highlighting Education
• IS-Academia Recent Developments
• IS-Academia Steering Committee
• Statistics Observatory - Educational Dashboards
• Housing
• Infotag – Giornata informativa
• PocketCampus and Library
• Continuing Education for Librarians in French-Speaking Switzerland
• Open Access Publishing Support Project
• New Services for the Sion and Fribourg Outposts
• Multilingual Communication

Human Resources
Sarah Bourquenoud has joined Educational Affairs to take over educational communications. She will share her time between DAF (60%) and Mediacom (40%) in order to pursue her involvement in the latter unit’s missions.
After 35 years at EPFL, Catherine Vinckenbosch will be taking a well-deserved retirement at the end of January 2016. During January we shall review her career within our institution and take this opportunity to warmly thank her for all her contributions. Ms Helen Fielding has been hired to take over the management of Student Affairs as from early January 2016, so as to have a hand-over period with Catherine Vinckenbosch to ensure a smooth transition. We are counting on you to give her a warm welcome and wish her every success at the head of SAE.
For further information: daniel.chuard@epfl.ch

The Registrar’s Office and the Doctoral School are pleased to announce that Ms Claude Zwicky is transferring from the College of Humanities to join the Doctoral Program in Finance as from the end of 2015. We wish her a warm welcome and every success in her new assignments!
For further information: camille.plessis@epfl.ch

Ordinance on Admission to EPFL
The implementation of changes related to the revision of the Ordinance on Admission to EPFL is ongoing. As from the forthcoming academic year, applicants holding a European Baccalaureate with an overall average of 70% to 80% may exceptionally be admitted if their file demonstrates proven exceptional skills in an activity conducted in parallel with their studies.
The following are examples of exceptional skills which may be considered:
- Publishing one or more articles in international peer-reviewed journals,
- Having established or headed, with notable success, their own start-up or an acknowledged community interest body,
- Pursuing an artistic career of international repute in parallel with bachelor studies,
- Being an elite athlete member of a national team.
An ad hoc committee will be set up to process these applications.
For further information: pierre-andre.besse@epfl.ch

Highlighting Education
Although a core mission of our institution, teaching too often remains in the shade of research, with the latter enjoying a high level of internal and external communication. Our Vice Provost for Education, Prof. Pierre Vandergheynst, wishes to remedy this situation through effective communications targeting education and teaching at EPFL. A small working party has been set up in order to promote best practices and innovative projects by EPFL lecturers by establishing appropriate communication channels.
For further information: albertine.kolendowska@epfl.ch

IS-Academia Recent Developments
In cooperation with the Student Affairs (SAE) Exchange Office, an electronic application form and a management system for outgoing exchange applications have been implemented as portals under IS-Academia. A modular application form will allow candidates to choose the type of application and a new IS-Academia portal tab will be accessible to all students except BA1 and BA2, CMS and incoming exchange students, allowing them to ) Apply for an exchange b) Edit their study plans (Learning Agreement). The administrators will have access to a portal designed to manage the whole application process. The members of the selection committee for exchanges outside Europe can also access this portal in read-only mode to view the personal statements by the candidates concerned.
For further information: isa@epfl.ch

IS-Academia Steering Committee
On the governance side, the Steering Committee chaired by Prof. Pierre Vandergheynst – the Vice Provost for Education - met at the end of October to validate the schedule for 2016. Among the flagship projects is the final deployment of the new timetable module and billing module. The projects portal will undergo a complete overhaul to meet the needs of all EPFL sections and laboratories. As for PhDs, plans include the provision of an electronic version of theses to the experts and complete management of the candidacy exam.
For further information: isa@epfl.ch

Statistics Observatory - Educational Dashboards
For the new 2015 academic year we observe a 2% increase in total ETH Board numbers, i.e. 10,124 students made up of 5,205 Bachelor, 2,563 Master and 2,077 PhD students.
As for Bachelor enrolments, a marked increase of 14% has been noted, bringing the total number of new BA1 students to 1,611. This rise is due to a boost in Swiss and French students. Only the GC, IN and EL sections record a drop in new enrolments. The number of Master students is also on the rise – by 2% (as much for new enrolments as for total student numbers).
For further informations: statistiques.formation@epfl.ch

Housing
In November 2015 the Housing Office concluded a new partnership with the Youth Hostel in Vidy for 5 furnished rooms rented at a preferential monthly rate.
The Housing Office has published offers to lease the house rented out by the Bois-Chamblard Foundation. Renting this house is open to anyone under an employment contract with EPFL. This offer is published on the Secretaries’ Intranet http://logement.epfl.ch/cms/site/habitation/lang/fr/blog-secretaires. People without access to this blog may write to logement@epfl.ch to receive all the details by email.

Infotag – Giornata informativa
Wednesday 2 December 2015 gave Swiss-German and Ticino high school students an opportunity to discover EPFL and its various study programmes. Nearly 280 participants gathered at the Rolex Learning Center Forum to meet the different Sections on their stands, talk and interact with current students and tour the campus. The internship afternoon was a great success with the visitors.
This version of the 2015 event is the last issue of its kind. As from the 2016 academic year, French, German and Italian-speaking high school students will all be welcomed at one and the same event in November, to be held at the Swiss Tech Convention Center.
For further information: spe@epfl.ch

PocketCampus and Library
Since November 2015 the EPFL PocketCampus mobile app allows one to search the collections of the EPFL Library, both for electronic and print resources. Earlier this year the Library approached the PocketCampus team to present the various data sources available to developers following the introduction of the BEAST search tool. The latter were keen to add information retrieval to the range of tools available under PocketCampus.
In the months that followed, the Library played a coordinating role between the PocketCampus team and the IT services of ETHZ and its library, whose cooperation was necessary for some features. The result is considered highly interesting by both the SISB and our Zurich counterparts. However, the decisive vote will naturally be cast by the end users (EPFL students and staff) and we look forward to their feedback.
For further information: questions.bib@epfl.ch

Continuing Education for Librarians in French-Speaking Switzerland
The library world is currently undergoing all kinds of changes. One of these developments is the introduction of new standards for describing documents, and the Library is playing a major role in a Swiss project in this field. German, Austrian and Swiss-German libraries have adopted a new description standard (RDA - Resource Description and Access cataloguing rules).
The introduction of this new standard naturally implies training for people engaged in cataloguing – i.e. designing courses, training the trainers and providing the training itself. As the project is essentially Germanic, the NEBIS library network turned to the EPFL Library to develop an RDA competence centre for the ten or so French-speaking libraries in the network. Our staff members Valérie Charbonnier and François Schmitt made a huge commitment to this project in 2015, to train themselves with our German-speaking colleagues, participate in the development of training in German and French, and now to deliver the training in French. This represented a significant workload, especially considering that we are the first French-speakers in Europe to adopt the RDA standard (only Quebec has made the leap so far). The RERO Network of French-speaking Swiss libraries has expressed interest in our expertise and many colleagues in this network are therefore attending training sessions to be completed on 14 December 2015.
For further information: questions.bib@epfl.ch

Open Access Publishing Support Project
The Academic Direction session endorsed the draft submitted by the Library for support to Gold OA publishing on 23 November. EPFL scientists will therefore be able to obtain financial support from the Library to publish in Open Access, subject to certain terms. A wide communication will be prepared, in particular in cooperation with the Research Office.
What is this pilot project about?
It provides financial resources to support EPFL researchers who need or wish to publish their articles in Gold OA: http://library.epfl.ch/page-108542-fr.html.
Basic principles:
‒ Support only to authors unable to finance the APCs from a research fund
‒ No co-financing for publication in hybrid journals, except in the case of specific agreements negotiated with the publishers
‒ Library’s contribution: max. CHF 2500 per publication
‒ On a "first come first served" basis

For further information: questions.bib@epfl.ch

New Services for the Sion and Fribourg Outposts
Physical distance from our outposts has a direct impact on the supply of documents which we can offer researchers. Indeed, in order to obtain a paper copy (book, magazine, etc.), until now one either had to come to the campus or have it delivered by post, which is costly for lack of internal mail. In close cooperation with the COOs of EPFL Valais Wallis and EPFL Fribourg and with the valuable help of the libraries on site (in Sion and Fribourg), a courier system between "relay" libraries and the outposts is currently being tested. Readers can choose a relay library as the collection point to which the document is then delivered by courier. All our electronic resources are naturally easily available to readers from their computers. Web pages dedicated to these outpost services are being drafted and expected to be online in February. The Library (dedicated liaison librarian and Infoscience specialist) visited Fribourg to inform and liaise with the researchers. This highly successful operation will be repeated in both Fribourg and Sion as new staff members take up their positions.
For further information: questions.bib@epfl.ch

Further outpost services are under discussion, such as access to language courses. Further information will be given once the principle has been established.

Multilingual Communication
Following the success of our episodes of Game of Thrones (presentation of our library services against footage from the cult series), some fans suggested to continue riding this wave by translating these episodes into English. To reduce costs and production time, the library’s team of editors decided to add subtitles. Find all our episodes on our YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/EPFLlibrary , http://bit.ly/1LnRaQq for the version with subtitles.
For further information: questions.bib@epfl.ch