Erasmus+ is the biggest EU educational program, which aims to make education better and to create new possibilities for all interested. Ukrainians, unlike citizens of many European countries, do not have the common practice to study abroad. Even today education abroad is commonly seen as something too difficult, far too expensive, and available only for the chosen. And, of course, you are not the chosen one.
After the audience analysis, our team made a conclusion that the biggest problem is not the lack of motivation, as we previously thought – on the contrary, many people would like to go study abroad. The real problem is the accessibility of studying abroad. When talking about the opportunities to study abroad, people tend to use difficult language and lots of words from educational lingo – while the important part of all that is almost inaccessible, kept in places where the interested in studying abroad are highly unlikely to click at. The respondents also told us that there are little to none real-life stories about people who got to the European schools and universities. In those stories, people who managed to get into European institutions were usually shown as some kind of superheroes, while people wanted to hear stories about how someone simple and usual like their neighbour Valya got into those universities. Because of that, people got used to thinking that there is a very small number of people who study abroad, and all of them were better than them.
To make the idea of studying abroad more friendly and accessible, firstly, we updated the visual style of Erasmus+ to make it simpler and more attractive. Secondly, together with the Erasmus+ experts, we turned the enormous complex documentation and manuals about education abroad into a handy capability map, which is simple and easy to use.
Thirdly, we collected stories from real people, real Ukrainians – students
(↗), scientists
(↗), and teachers
(↗) about their experience of education in the EU. Each of those people represented a part of the target audience of this project.
Lastly, we made a special test
(↗) for finding out whether you had a chance of a good education abroad. Spoiler: however badly you take the test, there was always a chance.