The EDU project, Part III; How interviews enriched our project
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 .
Keeping up with our idea, “The EDU project”( learn more about the EDU project by clicking here and here ), we have reached this transitional stage between the building of an idea and the implementation of it. But ideas are just theories and theories must be applied to the real world in order to survive. So, we had to take a step back before starting the construction of our platform and examine if our project would indeed have a longlasting impact and how our team would achieve this.
My team and I, are really excited about the project but before we would get too excited we had to test the whole idea on real world. The reason is pretty obvious; we don’t share the same ideas with the rest of the world and we don’t have the same willingness or abilities either. The EDU project aims to help by providing knowledge to those who really want to receive some . But, are those people seeking knowledge. interested to what our project is offering? Are the rest of the people willing to provide knowledge voluntarilly?
These are some of the questions that had to be answered before we would procceed with our plan. So, we came in contact with random people and made some interviews following the steps of OpenIDEO’s interview toolkit which finally was proved to be very helpful. The feedback we received from them was more than enlightening!
In general, interviewees seemed very positive to our project.what was remarkable about the answers given is that the majority of them would provide the platform with educational resources and would contribute with money or stationery. We feel that if people can help, they will help and this is a principle we were based on from starters. But, the majority -if not all of them- was confused about how people with no access to internet or computers would have access to our platform.
This is a question that had not crossed our minds because we took for granted the fact that everyone has access to internet these days. So, this problem triggered us for solutions. We soon then realized how important it is for us to have the support of non- profit organizations that would offer our project some guidance on such issues.
Right now, we are able to concentrate on more specific aspects of our project and keep going focused on our target!
The EDU team : Danai Kontitsi Xenia Ntavranoglou Katerina Tsigarida
Read the rest of our progress:
