PPMI has successfully completed a multi-country collaborative effort within the framework of Erasmus+ Programme (2020-1-PL01-KA226-HE-096356) in February of 2023. The 2-year project entitled ‘Navigating Social Worlds: Toolbox for Social Inquiry’ involved a consortium of 5 research institutions from countries of Central and Eastern Europe (Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and Romania; with PPMI covering the country of Hungary). The project highlighted the importance of mobilizing digital tools for the purposes of critical social inquiry in education.
The objectives of the project were the following:
- To map existing practices and solutions in online teaching and learning at HEIs in selected CEE countries.
- To equip teachers and lecturers with innovative tools that can be used for social inquiry.
- To equip all learners with knowledge, skills and competences that will enable them to make small scale social research projects.
- To make all learners aware and critical to data interpretation methods.
- To promote digital skills and educe digital gap in countries of Central and Eastern Europe.
The collaborative effort started with the identification and analysis of policies and strategies implemented at the national level for online learning as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, 5 country reports were compiled, providing comparable data. After this step, online surveys were conducted in the 5 participating countries, inquiring about the challenges university students faced in relation to the "transition" to distance learning. The most significant output of the project was the Toolbox – a collection of 18 modules divided in 4 sections (ontological section, designing research, conducting research and presenting research), available in 6 languages.
Throughout the project, PPMI lead the intellectual output concerning policy analysis and co-led the output responsible for the creation of the Toolbox with the consortium leader, Szkola Glowna Handlowa W Warszawie (Poland). PPMI actively participated in dissemination results as well, presenting the project’s findings in an international conference (Erasmus Scientific Days 2022, held in October of 2022 in Marrakech, Morocco) as well as through multiple academic studies, such as the Polish Przegląd Krytyczny or the journal Social Sciences.
