Changes when KTH's education database Kopps is closed down

The process of education planning will be largely the same as before, except for the changes listed below. Information about courses and programmes in About course  and the course and programme directory  will look like before. The difference is that the information is retrieved from Ladok instead of Kopps.

Below we list the major changes that are taking place and new functionality that will be added in connection with the transition to Ladok for education planning.

Role management in course

Roles in a course refer to examiner, course coordinator, teacher and course assistant. The roles are displayed in various places on the web, for example in About course, and form the basis for authorizations in Canvas and About course. The roles are currently managed via Kopps and UG groups, where there is a link from the course's page in Kopps to the UG group editor for adding the roles.

When KTH moves to Ladok for course planning, this management will change, and there will be two ways to add roles to courses:

• The roles examiner, course coordinator and teacher, users will add them via the Employee connections function in Ladok. It will only be possible to add roles to employees at KTH via the Employee Connection. The functionality is reviewed in the user training and is described in the Ladok training instructions .
• The role of course assistant will be able to be added directly in Canvas by the examiner, course coordinator and teacher. Instructions on how to do this can be found here: Add users manually to a Canvas room

Changes in About course, joint course information

With the transition to education planning in Ladok, an investigation was carried out regarding the course-wide information in About course to find out if all headings are still needed or if some headings should be removed.

Joint course information refers to the headings that are featured on About course but do not belong to the syllabus or course instance. The joint course information is displayed on the About course page.

The aim of the proposed changes is to:

• Make it easier for students to find information.
• Remove fields that are used infrequently.
• Ensure that information is kept up-to-date.

Headings removed from About course

The following headings will be removed when Kopps is closed down.

Contact person

The purpose of this heading was to allow students to contact someone who could answer questions about the course when no course session is scheduled or in progress. Since the examiner is always shown and the contact person and examiner are usually the same person, the examiner can be contacted if students have questions about the course when there is no course session.

Extension

As a small percentage of courses (10%) use this heading, and similar information on course selection is available in the syllabus, this heading is removed. There is also a risk that the information becomes outdated as courses are discontinued and new ones added.

Information for doctoral students about when the course is given

KTH is starting to create more course opportunities for courses at the doctoral level to show which courses are given the coming semester/academic year.

Equipment

Very few courses (3%) use this heading, and in almostmall cases it was a reminder that a laptop was needed to complete the course.

Process support for education administration processes

New functionality will be added when KTH moves to Ladok for education planning, and a major change is that there is process support for education administrative processes such as the establishment/revision of courses (establishment of course syllabus) and the establishment of education plan.

This means that the Word templates used when creating a course will disappear, and if a course is to be created, it will be done in Ladok's process support.

An important feature of the process support is traceability. It is being developed by the Ladok consortium and is planned to be ready in the first half of 2026. Then the Word template for course revision will stop being used, and course revision will also only take place in Ladok.

Instructions for the different process supports can be found here: Training instructions - working in Ladok

Convertus

The machine translation tool Convertus will no longer be used after the transition to education planning in Ladok. Since 2012, Convertus has been used at KTH for the translation of course syllabi from Swedish to English. With the upcoming discontinuation of Kopps, an investigation was conducted into whether Convertus would continue to be used after the transition to course planning in Ladok. The Portfolio Office at the Sub-Portfolio Education assisted the project with the investigation and conducted an analysis of how well Convertus works and to what extent it is used at KTH.

The investigation showed the following:

• Usage: 30% of the curricula used Convertus for translation.
• Quality: Users were divided on the quality of the translations.
• Cost: No estimate is available, but as no other university that has used Convertus will continue to do so after the transition to Ladok for education planning, KTH alone would have to bear the full cost.
• Integrations: As above, and if KTH is the only university using the translation tool, the Ladok consortium will not prioritize integrations between Convertus and Ladok.

Based on the results of the investigation and the fact that there are currently other, more powerful tools for translation, the steering group for the study administration object (StudAdm) decided not to continue with the machine translation tool Convertus after the transition to education planning in Ladok.

Kopps API

Kopps has had an API (Application Programming Interface) that made it possible to programmatically retrieve information about KTH's courses and programmes. Retrieval of education information has been used, among other things, for KTH's website and for integrations with other systems at KTH. Kopps API was public, which means that the information was also available to the public to download, an opportunity that has also sometimes been used by students and teachers at KTH.

With the closure of Kopps, the public Kopps API is also closed. There is no corresponding public API for Ladok, so when KTH moves to Ladok for education planning, it will no longer be possible for external users such as students and teachers to retrieve education information via an API. KTH's website and integrated systems will still have access to the necessary data.

The change regarding access for external users is made for several reasons:

• Security: Improved information protection, reduced risk of data breaches and reduced exposure to denial of service attacks.
• Access control: Ladok has specific usage rights that require access to be restricted to a certain group of users.
• Resource management: Controlled traffic to the API to prevent high loads that can cause performance issues and higher costs for KTH.