BRIDGE

Bridging Integrity in Higher Education, Business and Society (BRIDGE) is an Erasmus+ funded project, it is a multidisciplinary three-years project (2020-2023).

Academic integrity, research integrity, integrity in business, integrity in society are usually described as separate fields. In this project, we seek to create a bridge between them in order to reach a broader understanding of interrelated aspects of integrity between these fields. The target groups of this project are early career researchers, i.e. master and PhD students, and their supervisors. As the first step, the relevant studies in these areas will be analysed and examples of good practices will be consolidated.

In the second step, our aim is to make a bridge between academic and research integrity. As the target groups of these interrelated fields differ, we want to ensure that there is no gap between these fields by focusing on early career researchers – master and PhD students – as well as their supervisors by developing checklists and by making relevant open educational resources (including some of them gamified) and training opportunities.

Integrity is important for education and businesses likewise. The innovative potential of our project is based on the novel principles of integrity-enabled cooperation between universities and business entities to provide the necessary integrity skills for students as future employees and future partners. In our third output we will provide guidelines for integrity in research and business collaboration, open educational resources (inclusive those based on gamified real-life cases) and training for masters and PhD students and their supervisors.

Our fourth goal is to create a bridge between academic integrity and society. Citizen science (CS) is an open innovation method to achieve togetherness of academia with society. CS refers to the involvement of scientist-supervised citizens in each or certain stages of research. This definition of CS has a participatory character as a scientist provides an opportunity for citizens to co-create. Given this, early career researchers should acquire transferable skills to advance their career by being able to make a greater societal impact. However, it also requires reconsidering academic and research integrity, particularly in a research conduct and dissemination (e.g. open science). To address these, guidelines for ethical citizen science will help to find out how academic and research integrity should be revisited. Once the guidelines are developed, training will be delivered by targeting early career researchers and supervisors foremost, but other academia members will be invited too to learn more what CS is and how academic integrity should be reconsidered.

We will produce educational material by using developed gamified cases later combined in the flexible open educational modules. Combining gamified cases of various types, each partner can design adaptive educational modules adjustable to the certain target group with respect to the knowledge area, study degree, levels of competencies and preparedness, and so forth. The modules will be piloted through training. All training will be delivered in form of workshops and webinars.