The EDU project Part II; The brainstorming assembly
The EDU project is an initiative taken in the framework of the course Social Issues, Social Innovation and Corporate Responsibility ordinated by Assistant Prof Betty Tsakarestou. The initiative is taken by four Panteion University students who wish to challenge the social matter of illiteracy and provide the society with a solution that could bring a little progress to the problem. Specifically, The EDU project is an online platform with complementary, educational material of primary school uploaded by expertised volunteers .
In our world, knowledge is power, and education empowers. It is an indispensable part of the development equation. It has intrinsic value — extending far beyond the economic — to empower people to determine their own destiny. That is why the opportunity to be educated is central to advancing human development.
This is a belief that lead me and my team to proceed with a project that would bring innovation on the area of education. Our vision is that anyone who wants to be literate but lacks the chance will have access to lifelong, quality, primary education. Of course there are plenty of hardships that make our very own world suffer and are in need of immediate containment. These hardships were a great subject of interest to us but we wanted to reach the deepest roots of these problems so this is the reason why we concluded on the issue of education.
What we really had to do as a team was to deposit a whole of possible ideas that would take our project one step further heading to implementation. On this step we managed to organize our thoughts based on OpenIDEO’s brainstorm toolkit. It is truly remarkable how original and simple ideas would turn into developed ones and how they became challenging goals as we were processing and considering them as a team.
During the brainstorming process we indeed stated plenty of ideas but on a next step we had to pick the very best of them. This was a necessary and inevitable step because one way or another we would soon realize that not all of our ideas were attainable or sustainable. When you have a vision which you firmly support you are always at a risk of setting high but unrealistic goals and this is something our team is trying to avoid from starters. We want our goals to be specific, vital but still high!
So we unanimously ended up to The EDU project!
The main idea of our project is that we would construct an online platform through which anyone would have access to formative material, make donations or receive one. Ideally, we would like to motivate qualified tutors to cooperate with us and work voluntarily in order to provide the project with formative material or even play the role of actual teachers in real time. Meanwhile our project aims to raise people’s awareness of the current situation in national and worldwide education so that those who wish and have the ability may help through their contribution on our platform.
We are really excited about this idea because once we implement it, The EDU project would be an online platform which would both sensitize of the situation and offer opportunities to education in many possible ways. Every single person regardless of their age would have the chance to have access to education.
But we don’t become infatuated! We are taking one step at a time. Our target now is to find the support needed (like our cooperators) and conduct a study to find out if sponsors (maybe bookstores) are interested in our project. In parallel, we will be giving our vision a “form” by constructing the platform. For now and until our next update we most importantly stay focused to our goals and our belief that literacy is not a gift, it is a human right!!!
The Edu team: Katerina Tsigarida Danai Kontitsi Xenia Ntavranoglou
Read the rest of our progress:
