Open Education for Refugees

optimizing diversity through MOOCs

19 April 2017 - 15:00 CET

How can open education, in particular MOOCs, offer relevant solutions to help refugees gain access to higher education and employment in their new homelands?

Refugees face legal, linguistic, cultural, institutional and financial barriers to enter higher education. Furthermore, traditional universities can only offer places to a certain number of students, with funded places even rarer, and seldom have the capacity to cope with large numbers of refugees in a short time. The lengthy process of seeking asylum is lost time for most refugees. Utilizing MOOCs to support refugees in entering HE or the employment market is a strategy currently being explored by various initiatives in line with ECs communication 2013 “wider use of new technology and open educational resources can contribute to alleviating costs for educational institutions and for students, especially among disadvantaged groups”.

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Speakers

John Traxler

Research Professor of Digital Learning in the Institute of Education at the University of Wolverhampton UK. He is one of the pioneers of mobile learning and has been associated with mobile learning projects since 2001. He has worked with UNRWA for the Palestinian refugee community and with Palestinian and Jordanian universities.

Jennifer Contreras

Project Coordinator for Validation of Competency for Asylum Seekers and Refugees at the Department of Computer Science in Linnaeus University. She has been teaching information Technology/Computer Science subjects for 15 years in Asia and North Africa.

Paula Morais

Distance Education Expert for LASER Project, led by British Council and financed by the EU, aiming to engage Syrian refugees on online accredited courses and MOOCs, in Jordan and Lebanon. She has been working as an international consultant, advisor, lecturer and researcher on openness, distance education and blockchain in Africa, Middle East, Caribbean, for EU, UNDP, World Wide Web Foundation.

Alastair Creelman

Moderator

E-learning specialist at Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden. He is involved in several national and international projects and organisations in the field of e-learning, including the MOONLITE project.