The research and development project BIRD | Bildungsraum Digital ran from April 2021 to June 2025 and focused on the integration of digital teaching, learning, and service offerings within the framework of federated IT infrastructures. In close dialogue with stakeholders across the education sector, the project explored how existing systems can be meaningfully connected to make digital education more accessible and to enable seamless, individualised learning journeys.

BIRD aimed to design, test, and evaluate prototypical approaches, requirements, and technical solutions for a Digital Federated Infrastructure for Education, capable of linking both existing and new educational offerings on a national scale – with alignment to European standards. The result was an ecosystem of interoperable and independent educational services that support learners and educators along their educational pathways.

Background

Germany’s digital education landscape has long been characterised by fragmented solutions that often lack compatibility and interoperability. Learners and educators are frequently required to adapt to new systems at each stage of their educational path – whether transitioning between school, vocational training, or higher education, or even within the same phase. These breaks and redundancies hinder the creation of continuous, lifelong learning experiences across systems.

To address this fragmentation, the Federal Ministry of Research, Technologie and Space (BMFTR) launched the Digital Education Initiative, aiming to create a unified, future-oriented infrastructure that enables seamless access to educational resources across all sectors and phases of learning.

In support of this vision, the BMFTR funded a range of projects between 2021 and 2025 under three strategic objectives:

Objective 1: Development of digital learning resources for learners

Objective 2: Strengthening of digital competencies among educators

Objective 3: Design and prototypical development of a digital networking infrastructure

This initiative was originally launched as the National Education Platform (NBP) and later rebranded as Mein Bildungsraum. The core goal remained: to connect isolated digital systems and enable seamless educational journeys across all educational levels.

As one of the Objective 3 projects, BIRD – Bildungsraum Digital played a key role in the conceptual, technical, and organisational preparation of this infrastructure. While Objective 1 and 2 projects focused on educational content and qualification programmes, BIRD provided the foundational architecture and technical groundwork needed to connect these initiatives through a shared infrastructure – serving as a reference environment for the entire funding programme.

Project Goals

BIRD was conceived as an independent research and development project with the aim of identifying and designing the essential requirements, functions, and components of a federated digital infrastructure for education. In addition to technical challenges, BIRD also addressed organisational, pedagogical, and social aspects to assess both feasibility and practical applicability.

1. Development context – Testing technical feasibility

• Design of a reference prototype for a federated, interoperable infrastructure
• Testing of key technical components (e.g., federated identity management, single sign-on, data wallet, credential management)
• Demonstration of how digital education services can be integrated into a federated system

2. Usage context – Evaluating usability and value

• Assessment of acceptance and usability among diverse stakeholders: learners, educators, institutions, service providers
• Development of use cases drawn from real-world education scenarios
• Implementation of concrete teaching and learning formats, including media literacy programmes for educators

3. Transfer context – Ensuring scalability and transferability

• Deriving insights to inform future public tenders and infrastructure rollouts
• Development of reusable standards, APIs, and governance recommendations
• Strategic alignment with ongoing initiatives such as XHochschule, EDSSI, and the Digitaler Campus

These goals formed the basis for a multidisciplinary approach that integrates technological innovation with pedagogical relevance and structural adaptability.

In addition, BIRD also followed three overarching guiding principles that structured its prototypical development efforts: Connecting content, Connecting people, and Connecting tools. These principles offered a practice-oriented framework to explore what a future digital education infrastructure needs to enable, and what BIRD set out to prototype and investigate:

• Connecting content: The project explored how digital learning resources can be made accessible across systems and contextually integrated into learning processes – in a user-centric and data-sovereign manner.
• Connecting people: BIRD examined how digital infrastructure can support collaboration across institutional boundaries, enabling learners, educators, and education providers to work together more effectively through interoperable services and shared spaces.
• Connecting tools: Through prototypical implementations, BIRD tested how different platforms and applications could be technically integrated using standardized interfaces and federated architecture principles.

These guiding principles were not goals for a productive system rollout, but served as structuring reference points in an exploratory research and development project aimed at evaluating the feasibility and design of core infrastructure components.

Project Approach

BIRD adopted an agile, iterative R&D approach that combined technical development with empirical research and continuous engagement with the educational community. The goal was to balance technical feasibility with user needs and organisational conditions.

At the core of the project were several key components: a user-friendly portal, a metadata middleware for federated content indexing, a secure data wallet for personal learning records, and a federated identity management system. In parallel, BIRD explored governance models, privacy safeguards, usage patterns, and system interoperability through research activities.

The project worked in close cooperation with other BMFTR-funded Objective 1 and 2 projects, many of which relied on BIRD’s infrastructure as a technical reference for developing and testing their own digital offerings. Through this collaboration, BIRD generated valuable insights for the future design and implementation of a nationwide, federated education infrastructure.

Core Technical Components

As a linking infrastructure between educational platforms and digital learning services, BIRD was not designed to compete with existing content or tools, but rather to interconnect them in a meaningful way. The project focused on three core functionalities, which were developed in prototype form and tested under real-world conditions:

Shared Metadata Management
BIRD implemented a federated metadata framework that connected distributed systems and content providers. This enabled consistent indexing of educational offerings across platforms and made resources accessible via a unified search interface – regardless of their source system.

Data Wallet
The Data Wallet functioned as a user-controlled space for managing personal educational data. It allowed learners to store their records (such as grades, certificates, or participation data) in a secure and privacy-compliant way, and to selectively share them with connected services.

Single Sign-On (SSO)
BIRD introduced a federated Single Sign-On mechanism that enabled users to access multiple services with one unified account. This reduced login barriers, allowed seamless transitions between applications, and supported continuous learning experiences across institutional boundaries.

These three components served as foundational building blocks for a user-centric, interoperable education infrastructure and were actively tested in cross-platform usage scenarios during the course of the project.

Extended Value-Added Services

In addition to the core technical components, the project also designed and developed prototypical value-added services. These were intended to implement key usage scenarios in an exemplary way and to operationalize the three guiding principles embedded in the project – connecting content, connecting people, and connecting tools.

Learning Path Finder
The Learning Path Finder was developed as a prototype for the personalized and context-sensitive recommendation of educational resources. The goal was to make cross-system content visible in relation to individual learning needs and objectives, thus exploring new possibilities for content-level integration. Both metadata models and visual representations were used to support orientation within the digital education space.

Buddy Finder
The Buddy Finder was conceived as a prototype for socially connecting learners who share similar topics, goals, or challenges. The application served as a starting point for considering how social presence, peer learning, and mutual support can be enabled within federated digital learning environments.

Workspace
The digital Workspace represented a prototype environment in which various tools, services, and content could be integrated into a personalized, cross-system usage context. The focus was on interoperability and the ability to flexibly support context-dependent learning scenarios.

These prototypical value-added services illustrate how a federated infrastructure can support not only technical integration, but also concrete pedagogical and social use cases. They made tangible the potential functional value such an infrastructure can offer to diverse stakeholder groups.

Outreach and Community Engagement

A defining feature of the BIRD project was its community-based approach, which framed the development of digital infrastructure as a collaborative societal task – not just a technical one. Rather than designing solutions in isolation, BIRD relied on structured engagement with stakeholders from across the education sector: schools, universities, continuing education, civil society, public administration, and tech providers.

Through ongoing dialogue, participatory workshops, and co-development formats, the project integrated diverse perspectives into the design and implementation of its infrastructure components. The aim was to create an open, interoperable, and widely accepted system based on real-world needs and use cases.

The community-based approach was reflected in a wide range of dissemination and outreach activities, including public events, expert forums, and targeted knowledge-transfer formats – all contributing to the iterative refinement of the project and the infrastructure it envisioned.

Project Structure

BIRD was organised as a scaled agile research and development project, following the SAFe framework. The project was structured across three levels: a steering board for strategic decisions, an advisory board providing guidance and expertise, an implementation layer responsible for delivery and iteration.

The project was jointly led by the University of Potsdam and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), with support from a dedicated product management team that coordinated both content and technical implementation.

Specialised agile teams worked across 14 defined work packages, covering architecture, core components (portal, middleware, wallet), governance, evaluation, dissemination, and coordination.

This structure ensured close collaboration between academic, technical, and administrative actors and provided a coherent foundation for developing and testing the federated digital education space.

Quality Assurance

A dedicated impact-oriented monitoring framework was established to continuously evaluate project progress and outcomes. Both qualitative and quantitative indicators were used to assess the effectiveness, transferability, and user value of the infrastructure components – with the goal of informing future implementation and scaling efforts..

The impact-oriented monitoring was presented at the event ‘Bildungsraum Digital: Rückblick & Perspektiven’ on 25 February 2025. Here you can find the recording of the presentation and the presentation slides (both in German).