Abstract:

The educational services market in Russia is highly competitive. At the beginning of the 2019-2020 academic year, 724 higher education organizations carry out educational activities, and 4,068,300 students study [1]. This fact is evidence of the increased expectations and requirements on students' part for the educational process and those competencies and skills they can implement in their labor market. This fact also testifies to the higher education system's readiness for transformations and cooperation with social partners, employers, and other organizations to create conditions for successful competitive advantages by graduates. At the present stage of development of higher education in Russia, the task is to introduce and spread the practice of acquiring learning skills by doing, that is, experiential learning. This task is implemented in project training in various courses with the obligatory supervision of the project by teachers and with the presence of social order from employers and other organizations of the city and region. Students' project work can be related to the acquisition and development of various skills of students. For the specialty "political science," one of the major tasks is collecting and processing information, presenting it in the future in the form of an analytical report.

In this article, we turn to the experience of a project implemented by students to conduct a series of focus groups on the issue of trust in the media. The work on this project includes four main stages. The first stage is preparatory, associated with creating a research program, a research tool. The practical implementation of the first stage showed that this part was the most difficult. There were several reasons. At first, the students had either too narrow ideas about the possibilities of applying the method and mistrust of the participants who would not be able to get involved in the work quickly. Secondly, the students were supposed to cover an extensive range of issues and use different stimulating materials (newspapers, videos, texts from blogs), which would take a long time to implement the method and lead to fatigue of the participants. The second stage is a focus group, which required efforts to transform the study visit and create special conditions, attracting additional equipment for viewing audio and video recordings. The third stage is data processing and primary analytics. The fourth stage is the presentation of the results to the customer and receiving feedback.

A significant result of this practice is that the students felt involved in communication with the customer, they gained confidence in the implementation of a certain method of collecting information and realized their strengths in different roles in a large study (coordinator, recruiter, moderator, analyst, supervisor, speaker, speaker and more). The students were stunned by the possibilities of using the focus group method, receiving preliminary information from the townspeople, hearing and understanding the central issue for them, and not invented due to the system's work. All of this has also become an important source of information for the customer.

References:
[1] Education in numbers: 2020: a short statistical collection. Moscow: NRU HSE, 2020. URL: https://www.hse.ru/mirror/pubs/share/404878648.pdf

Keywords:

Focus group, project learning, learning by doing, experiential learning.