About

Jopscip project will indirectly address the priorities of digital transformation and sustainable growth and jobs through enhancing digital literacy and providing European-quality education in Political Science (PS) to ensure labor market proximity in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries.
Specific objectives of the project are to design an innovative curriculum and management mechanisms for a joint MA program in PS among EaP countries via European Approach for Accreditation of JP (Bologna Declaration, Yerevan 2015). The developed Joint Program (JP) will comply with EU quality standards and acquire accreditation for the joint MA program in PS on international and national levels through Agency for Quality Assurance and Accreditation Austria (AQ Austria) and national quality assurance agencies in partner countries.
As an academic discipline, Political Science not just about understanding how governments function or political processes take place, it is also about finding innovative ways to solve socio-political issues. The general objective of the project is to improve governance, peace, security and human development, and to strengthen active citizenship through the development and implementation of a modernized, internationalized and digitized joint MA degree program in PS among the Eastern Partnership countries.
The project will envisage to capacitate teaching and administrative staff of the Higher Educational Institutions to implement the multilateral, innovative managing and teaching methods for joint MA program in PS, as well as to strengthen the capacities of HEIs via creating joint virtual educational space for joint MA program in PS. The project aims to engage with the international PS field through dissemination, cooperative research and labor market proximity. In the final year of the project joint teaching activities and test teaching will be conducted.

PROJECT VISION, IMPACT AND INNOVATION

Project Goal is to improve governance, peace, security and human development, and to strengthen active citizenship through the development and implementation of a modernized, internationalized and digitized joint MA degree program in Political Science among EaP countries.
Project objectives are in line with the wider objective of modernization and internationalization of the teaching in Political Science (PS) in the EaP, by offering a joint MA degree.

Those objectives include

• To design an innovative curriculum and management mechanisms for a joint MA program in Political Science among EaP countries via European Approach for Accreditation of JP (Yerevan 2015);
• To comply with EU quality standards and acquire accreditation for the joint MA program in PS on international and national levels;
• To capacitate teaching and administrative staff of the HEIs to implement the multilateral, innovative managing and teaching methods for joint MA program in PS;
• To strengthen the capacities of HEIs via creating joint virtual educational space for joint MA program in PS;
• To engage with the international PS field through dissemination, cooperative research and labor market proximity;
• To implement the joint teaching activities and test teaching.

Impact of the Project

The project is meant to add value to the development of higher education in the EaP countries and help universities to meet quality standards, internationalize and develop cooperation by satisfying their needs for comprehensive knowledge in the discipline of Political Sciences, International Relations and European studies. The developed programs and courses will enrich the MA programs in partner universities and contribute to their capacity building.

Therefore, the impact of this project could be defined as follows:

• Increased quality of education and training, higher levels of excellence and attractiveness with increased opportunities for all; overall influence over the reform and modernization of graduate education;
• Education, training and youth systems that are better aligned to the needs of and opportunities offered by the labor market;
• Improved provision and assessment of basic and soft skills, particularly: critical thinking, creativity, digital skills and media literacy, required by the labor market;
• Improved use of European reference tools for recognition, validation and transparency of competences and qualifications;
• Increased use of learning outcomes when describing and defining qualifications, parts of qualifications and curricula, in support to teaching and learning and in assessment;
• New and increased inter-regional and transnational cooperation of HEIs;
• More strategic and integrated use of ICTs and open educational resources (OER) in education, training and youth systems;
• Increased motivation for political science and international relations learning through innovative teaching methods;
• Reinforced interaction between practice, research and policy;
• Trained human resources to develop syllabus based on the market needs and contemporary standards; trained human resources to develop and implement collaborative degrees and organize student smooth mobility: agents for implementing the Bologna envisioned reform of student mobility on the international, national and institutional levels;
• Developed collaborative schemes of inter-institutional collaboration, national and institutional mechanisms for joint degrees;
• Mobile student and ability to strategically plan individual path with increased employability perspectives; Increased employability perspectives for students
• Strengthened capacities to develop and implement outcome based educational programs
• Regional integration and establishment of comparable recognition, quality assurance tools for credit recognition and transfer enabling the national and international more effective schemes
• Institutional and national ownership by adopting and ratifying the major outcomes of the program

Innovative nature

Building up on the Project activities and benefitting from already existent experience of collaboration among some members of the Consortium, this project innovates in number of aspects:

1. First and foremost, this will be the first joint MA program in political science with the specific focus on the EaP countries both in terms of its structure as well as in terms of its academic focus;
2. For all three target EaP countries, this will be the first precedent of an EU-accredited political science MA program operating locally;
3. The academic staff of the respective EaP countries will further develop and improve their teaching capacity as a result of the constant exchange with their European counterparts as well as with each other, which is a rare opportunity given the lack of funding for these kinds of activities in the HE institutions of these countries;
4. Easier access to the European standard education in political science for the students from the EaP countries and multiplying the inclusion of partner to academic networks in the field with integrating them into www.erasmus-network.eu as most prominent and old internationalization network in Political Science;
5. The strongest MA Diploma in political science (issued by all the HE institutions involved in the consortium) students from the target EaP countries could have obtained locally so far;
6. New and methodologically sophisticated collaborative and comparative research with the specific focus on the political developments of the EaP countries and the process of their Europeanization;
7. New digital tools for distance learning as well as for the management of the teaching process connecting, HE institutions of the EaP countries with the European members of the Consortium;
8. To establish an Open Access publication platform on Integration & Governance for Working Papers of scholars and students as academic exchange basis for experts in EaP countries and other regions in transformation (post-soviet regions as Baltic countries, Black Sea Region, Caucasus, Central Asia).