Share Your Soils Erasmus Project

Project Title

Share Your Soils

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2019

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Natural sciences; Environment and climate change

Project Summary

Technology impact on our todays life along with the concept of the “shrinking” world is creating a constant need to develop and improve new tools including these used in the fields of research and education. Together with technological development there is a growing influence of the social media as a tool used for diversified goals. From the conventional point of view they are often seen as the key driver of communications and marketing. Furthermore, growing number of schools and teachers are utilizing social media in the classroom to further engage students in the learning process. Social media is a tool that teachers on all educational levels can use to make their classroom more engaging and relevant. Results of the survey carried among the students showed the non-negligible demand for the up-to-date, hi-tech educational tools based on social media. Over 90% of the respondents indicated the lack modern approach to pedology classification teaching and scarcity of digital tools usable in the teaching process. Moreover Higher Education is facing presently enormous challenge connected with generation “Z” – ‘digital natives’ entering the universities needing different educational approach. On the other hand, technical languages used in environmental disciplines, such as soil science, necessitate to be unified and correlated on European and global scale to be useful for academic purposes. The WRB (World Reference Base for Soil Resources) is the soil classification system designed as easy means of communication among scientists to identify, characterize and name major types of soils and has also been accepted by the European Commission as the official system within the European Union.
The idea of the SYStem project is to create edutainment social media dedicated to soil description and classification using the WRB. It will be based on mobile application for uploading soil profile photos with description of soil horizons, materials and properties along with its coordinates and students (users) proposal for the soil classification. The application would be working both on and offline. Application users will have the possibility to interact with each other and share their knowledge helping less experienced colleagues through comments on other students and researchers uploads within the international SYStem application community. The project will be based not only on the creating the advanced international social media tool for soil science classification and education issues which is the main goal. It also includes the preparation of exercises manual on how to use SYStem application and social media in edutainment-focused teaching. In addition the soil Omnibus dedicated to support the teaching of newest edition of WRB system (2015) on a university level suitable in various environmental science courses (e.g. environmental protection, geography) will be prepared. Afterwards the evaluation of prepared edutainment module will be carried out during students workshops focused on using the application. Studying the usefulness of the WRB classification for the soil cover of partner countries and its evaluation of the WRB with regards to varied European environmental conditions will help develop the classification system itself. WRB based soil data from application users across the world are the most important added values of this project.
The consortium brings together specialists from 10 Institutions from 8 countries (Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Poland, Slovenia and Spain) having research and educational experience in soil science issues of different regions of Europe. Individual members of the consortium also participated in a number of works related to the adaptation of the WRB in regional research (national scale), as well as international (testing WRB for improvement of next editions) and its use in the context of learning and teaching at the higher education level. Such experience is essential to reach the project objectives. Moreover, in the context of spatial dimension, the heterogeneity of the countries that research members originate from is fully covering the European landscapes and soilscapes variability.
All of the project outcomes which are the edutainment social media tool, user’s manual, soil classification Omnibus and excersises leaflet will be freely accessible throughout EU and world. All students and teachers will have open access to register , use it and ask for experts feedback. The soil data uploaded will be also available for other users as an active collection of various soils with multimedia and geolocation features. The obtained products will comprise an innovative and powerful for the university level teaching tool. It is expected also to be the supporting tool not only the HEI teachers, but also High School teachers and active environmental researchers and practitioners. All of the above mentioned results will last many years after the founding period of SYStem project.

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 352761 Eur

Project Coordinator

UNIWERSYTET MIKOLAJA KOPERNIKA W TORUNIU & Country: PL

Project Partners

• UNIWERSYTET PRZYRODNICZY WE WROCLAWIU
• LATVIJAS LAUKSAIMNIECIBAS UNIVERSITATE
• UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI SASSARI
• Česká zemědělská univerzita v Praze
• UNIVERSIDAD DE EXTREMADURA
• UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI
• PECSI TUDOMANYEGYETEM – UNIVERSITY OF PECS