Žemaitaitienė, Gintarė

These guidelines are one of the key documents of the HEIsCITI Erasmus+ Project, designed to empower local and regional authorities to initiate and sustain innovative, collaborative dialogue with young citizens—particularly students—supported by Higher Education Institutions, secondary schools, and other relevant stakeholders.

The methodology is universal and focused on soft skills, making it applicable to all universities regardless of specialization. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) should equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary to understand the importance of responsible citizenship and inclusive, sustainable urban development, as well as to foster and promote cooperation between stakeholders. This methodology addresses the new and complex demands of today’s reality by developing skills and building competencies that are relevant to both local and global needs.

Students are understood as intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual human beings who interact reciprocally with the political, economic, social, cultural, and spiritual dimensions of their communities (Maistry & Thakrar, 2012, p. 65). In this context, a new study course was developed and piloted to strengthen students’ preparedness for community engagement practice. The article presents this study course, outlining its aims, content, structure, and instructional design, and discusses its accessibility for higher education institutions seeking to foster citizen participation processes. The implementation of the course at Mykolas Romeris University (Vilnius, Lithuania) is used as an illustrative case to demonstrate its applicability and potential impact. The course “Participation Management: Tools for Citizen Engagement and Community Empowerment” builds on students’ knowledge to promote compassionate, socially engaged, critical, and responsible citizenship. By engaging students with real community challenges and integrating them into purposeful activities, universities assume a mediating role in addressing societal issues and preparing future professionals capable of contributing to community resilience.

A recent literature review shows a growing interest in the application of design thinking principles in classroom and online teaching across different fields. At the same time reflection is an inseparable quality of professional competence and is consequential in developing problem solving and decision-making capacity. Therefore, the combination of design thinking and reflective teaching in the curriculum could advance the competence of the students. The presentation aims to share good practice of combining design thinking and reflective teaching in communication studies to explore the possibilities of moving from organisational to community-based solutions. Usually students are trained to analyse the communication problems of the organisation and have less understanding about community-based problems and solutions. Encouragement to move from organisational to local context projects in the communication studies was given by the project “Higher Education Institutions as Innovative Triggers of Sustainable Development in European Cities in Post Covid-19 Era” (KA220-HED-96EB51E1). However, the pilot process experienced some difficulties and problems thus leading to a deeper analysis of this experience, insights and conclusions for more comprehensive outcomes. Together with the learning process, the qualitative study was implemented. It was based on written reflections by students and teachers, organized three times during the process: interim, after finalizing the projects and after projects’ presentation at the local community. The qualitative content analysis was used for data analysis. The results of the first reflection showed that the gradual involvement in the chosen working methods was effective and confirmed that the appropriate way to organize the working teams was applied. However, it also raised a few “red flags” that were addressed promptly and helped the teams: resolving conflicts within, encouraging questioning in the engagement phase, and clarifying the wording of the task in the define, empathize, and ideate phases. The biggest challenge observed was the students' time management, which caused the vast majority to miss the opportunity to do the empirical research and to gather additional information, and which they acknowledged as a major shortcoming. The second reflection focused on the successes and lessons of the project, as well as the evaluation of team and individual work. The third reflection revealed advantages and challenges of the possibility to implement developed projects at the community level and possible barriers moving from classroom to real life situation learning. Overall, the reflections emphasized the more positive aspects of teamwork, process, and methods. At the same time, there was a healthy self-criticism on the process. In sum, the analysis of both positive and negative experience of design thinking principles implementation to the study process was possible due to applying reflective teaching. It extended academic knowledge, provided insights, how to improve learning process, offered examples which potentially could be applicable for different learning contexts.

Patient‐led online health communities (OHCs) consist of empowered patients who are more likely to share higher levels of knowledge: conceptual and procedural knowledge. In patient‐led OHCs knowledge is shared via the short path and there exists the practice of sharing inadequate knowledge. Patient knowledge sharing activity is the highest in the mitotic phase of the patient‐led OHC life cycle. The nature of queries generated in OHCs can indicate to stakeholders the gap between the medical information patients receive and the medical information they want, the level of patient empowerment and the need for patient empowerment knowledge.

Maternity care communication is a generative topic both globally and nationally. Maternity care research has predominately dealt with mental health or physical environment issues, with little focus on healthcare providers’ innovative business-consumer communication or brand management. With the application of brand equity in maternity care communication in social media cases, the purpose of the present study to investigate matching between organizational identity and the represented image. Theoretical grounding elucidates the evidence of digital innovation in action. Qualitative methodology allows eliciting further research directions with relevant research instruments. Two Lithuania-based healthcare sector organization cases with equal value parameters (time, place, activities, and context) are researched. Quantitative and qualitative data analysis, based on virtual observation, is performed. The gap between what organizations want to communicate and what they actually communicate is identified. Managerial and communication actions creating premises for collaborative behaviour and value creation by specific communication tools across such issues as medical influencers, community managers, or readiness for managing healthcare during the pandemic are surveyed. Research limitations due to the narrowness in scope, investigating only two cases within a specific field, are counterbalanced by the completeness of the quantitative and qualitative inquiry into social media data. Despite this, this innovatory study not only expands academic knowledge, suggests an instance of methodology and a research sample, possibly adaptable to varying contexts, but also implies potential issues for communication and management practitioners at healthcare institutions, suggesting apprehensible solutions.

University faculty members and managers agree that modern generations of students differ in values, beliefs, and dominant traits, while their attitudes and preferences are often conflicting and contradictory. This leaves open the question of whether those generational peculiarities are taken into account by university recruitment officers? To address this question, a research project was initiated to examine the ways in which students made the decision to enroll in communication study programs at specific university in the 2018 intake. This research aimed to look into the communicational priorities of the newly recruited students as well as into their content preferences. A questionnaire was designed to systematically assess the students’ motives in seeking specific information, their choice of specific communication channels, and the possible triggers that led to their decisions to enroll in specific communication programs. To further identify differences, Generation Y students were researched in an additional focus group study on the attitudes of students who started communications studies at the same university in 2016. Both scientifically and practically valuable results showed surprisingly different preferences for visual and textual material. The data gathered also indicates a considerable difference between the attitudes of students, which emerged over the course of just two years. Apart from its data, the scientific novelty of this research can be seen in the interdisciplinary fusion of different approaches that involve marketing, education science, communication, the management of educational organizations, and generational theory. Practically, the findings of this research will help university recruitment officers to design new and more efficient marketing strategies that effectively target Generation Z students.