Erasmus students’ involvement in quality enhancement of Erasmus+ mobility through digital ethnography and ErasmusShouts
本文提出利用数字民族志方法，通过ErasmusShouts网络应用收集伊拉斯谟学生的生活体验数据，以弥补传统调查的不足，帮助高校改进教育实践和学习环境。
Erasmus+ is one of the European Union’s flagship programs which supports short-term international student mobility within Europe as one of its primary purposes. Erasmus students are uniquely well placed to compare educational processes of their home and host institutions, the learning environments and student life conditions. They are so far under-utilized resource of information on quality of educational practices and insights on how to improve student experiences. Furthermore, international students often lack a collective voice in university structures where they could contribute to the decisions concerning quality of educational practices. So far, student surveys have been the most frequently used approach in understanding lived experiences of Erasmus and international students. This commentary argues that qualitative approaches to collect data on student lived experiences are superior to survey research, yet more costly. In times when all students are digital natives, it has become possible, however, to canvass data from students through digital ethnographic approaches. The commentary introduces ErasmusShouts, a web application, which engages Erasmus students as auto-ethnographers and prompts them to reflect on, and record their lived experiences of Erasmus mobility. This approach can be adopted to generate large-scale qualitative data on international students’ experiences for use by higher education practitioners and researchers to improve educational practices and learning environments.