Project Description

Our project is focused on new or updated innovative methods under so called academic integrity. You can imagine a whole spectrum of preventive measures how to fight with plagiarism and other bad habits not only in academic world effectively. Most of the project partners are already in very close cooperation in the field of academic integrity. There have been efforts to communicate on a common platform before, but this initiative creates the opportunity to formalise and expand this kind of cooperation. The “umbrella” ENAI platform will be a trans-national portal for disseminating and sharing high quality resources for promoting academic integrity to a wide range of stakeholders. But this project is not just about a platform. There is a main goal to prepare a “content” of this platform, to teach people how they should behave in education, academic research and also in their career. The content includes methodological materials for teachers, self-evaluation and self-assessment tools, interactive courses as well as distance learning (blended learning) and many other supporting tools. All these outcomes represent very innovative tool kit because there are no other similar common materials for academic integrity on EU level like this.

An important aim will be to raise awareness in the matters of plagiarism, academic ethics and academic integrity. ENAI will be focused not only on HEI students and their teachers (our main target group), but on whole academia (professors, post-docs, PhD, administration staff and management, including academic ethics committees, etc.) and future HEI students (high school students) and their teachers. It means that ENAI will address such misbehavior in academia as cheating, plagiarism, scientific misconduct, mobbing (bullying), and so on. One unifying and international body representing interests of many institutions all over the Europe could be also a great advantage in potential negotiations on higher levels. For now there are 12 core partners across Europe (project consortium) of which 11 represent universities. But many others claimed their readiness for future cooperation under ENAI platform. The phenomenon of academic integrity is obviously interdisciplinary topic as you can see in the case of project consortium. There are many different faculties and departments (economic, medical, ICT..) and even Slovak information center for science, technology, innovations and education as a representative of business point of view participate in project activities. Moreover many other institutions from EU and beyond are willing to participate in future ENAI platform. Nine of them are supporting us directly by official Letter of Support. There are 3 expected outputs as main project results. First of all we will work on educational materials for HEI teachers and students. It means design of course for teachers and modules for students including videos, FAQ about plagiarism, didactical notes or typology of intertextual mistakes. Second output consists of tools for cross-sectoral cooperation as a manual, real-life examples or even workshop for high school students and teachers. Last but not least we will prepare a handbook (tool-kit) including general guidelines, four kinds of self-evaluation tools, academic integrity self-improvement in a nutshell or glossary of terms. The project activities to reach these outputs are based on qualitative research in particular countries when researchers investigate country specifics and examples of best practice. Then they are working together at joint training events. Moreover there will be held an international conference every year where other stakeholders can discuss the project outcomes and give us such necessary feedback.European Network for Academic Integrity (referred as ENAI platform) will be a consortium of HEIs and other relevant stakeholders which will share their experience and best practices in the field of academic integrity. The platform will continually work on project activities after the project is finished – develop materials, organize events (namely annual conferences), circulate information amongst partner universities. Running of the platform will be ensured by an office financed by membership fees. Thanks to all these activities we are able to spread the outcomes of our project to other European countries and even beyond European borders as well to other disciplines.