Five years of cooperation with UniNow

The core idea of the cooperation with UniNow was to offer an app that students could use to view their exam results, but also other information such as the dining hall menu or the library account on their mobile phones. At the time, there was already an app from the University of Bayreuth for displaying event notifications. Developing a module to view exam results would have involved considerable effort. So it was obvious to use synergies and rely on UniNow as a third-party app.

During the Corona pandemic, this decision proved to be a stroke of luck. Together with UniNow, access control to seminar rooms and lecture halls via QR code could be reliably implemented. Lastly, a module was developed under the auspices of the university sports department to enable the display of paid course fees for university sports. This module became a model for other universities that now also want to introduce this digital sports card.

Oliver Gschwender, who is currently in charge of the cooperation with UniNow on the IT side of the University of Bayreuth, was recently at a conference to follow the latest technical developments of UniNow. There, the University of Bayreuth was also awarded a certificate for the many years of cooperation.

Numerous new developments were also presented at the conference that could possibly be available to students in Bayreuth in the future. For example, the universities of Mainz and Magdeburg have integrated a digital student ID into the app, which is accepted as a ticket for the semester ticket for public transport and for borrowing in the libraries there. Care was taken to ensure that personal data is only stored on the students' end devices, so that this solution meets the high requirements of the Data Protection Act. "The question of data protection is also always relevant for us," says Gschwender, who is carefully considering which functions might be technically interesting for the University of Bayreuth.