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Well, the OER19 conference came and went on 10-11 April, and I am finally catching up. I wish I could express the joy that the OER conference sparks in me every year for the opportunity to meet up with my open education "tribe", and be stimulated, challenged and provoked into thinking in new ways about openness. This conference was no exception from previous ones, and I came back bursting with new ideas that will no doubt find their way into my blog over the coming months. But first, I would like to share an update on the panel presentation I convened on enabling equity and inclusion for asylum seekers and refugees through open education. This blog post follows on from Part 1 with the same title, which was written before the conference.

The panellists

I was honoured to be able to bring together four people from different institutions in different countries doing innovative work in this area: Markus Wachowski from Kiron Open Education gGmbH (who joined us online from Berlin), Alessandro Caforio from Uninettuno in Italy, Gill Ryan from the Open University in Scotland, and Paul O'Keeffe from InZone, University of Geneva. Paul stood in for Barbara Moser-Mercer (Director of InZone), who was unfortunately unable to join us. The panel discussed how open education can enable equity and inclusion for asylum seekers and refugees. During the session we were also joined by James Brunton of Dublin City University, who shared information about how his institution is enabling asylum seekers to participate in online higher education.

Video recording

The session was recorded in a Zoom room, and the recording is available on YouTube (subtitles can be enabled by clicking on the CC button below the video). The recording contains three "windows" - in the top left you can see some of the participants who were in the room; in the top right are the on-site presenters; and in the bottom strip you can see Markus in his "remote" location. Unfortunately the chat box did not get captured in the recording, but I think the subtitles make up for that, as we mainly used the chat box to type notes while audience members were speaking so that Markus could hear them.

Links from the panel presentation

Some of the key resources mentioned the presenters were:

The Padlet produced by the panellists for the conference presentation - this contains information about the programmes offered to refugees by the University of Geneva's InZone, Kiron, Uninettuno, the Open University in Scotland, and Dublin City University. You can also find links to further resources listed in the final column of the Padlet.

Gill mentions the Refugees' Educational Resources (RefER) Project Final Report. This was a report that Gill and I worked on for the Open University in 2018, and it contains a database of over 500 online learning resources that are being used by organisations in the UK that support refugees and asylum seekers. Gill suggests forming a community of practice around these resources - certainly something to follow up on in the future.

Markus mentions the E-Valuate project - this is an EU-funded project which aims to contribute to more effective policies for the recognition of new forms of online learning, with a special focus on refugees' access to higher education.

Paul mentions the Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium (CLCC). Coordinated by UNHCR and the University of Geneva (InZone), the Connected Learning in Crisis Consortium (CLCC) was founded in 2016. The CLCC aims to promote, coordinate and support the provision of quality higher education in contexts of conflict, crisis and displacement through Connected Learning ( UNHCR, 2019). The CLCC has produced the CLCC Quality Guidelines Playbook, which provides guidelines for higher education institutions on connected learning.

Next steps

The presentations were rich and fascinating - I'm pretty sure I was not the only person in the room who was impressed at the wide-ranging nature of the work being done by these organisations to support displaced people into and through higher education via online learning. I won't try to summarise what the panellists said, as I would really like to encourage anyone who is interested to watch the recording and read the Padlet. Suffice to say here that we concluded the session with unanimous agreement that OER19 had provided us all, both panellists and participants, with a great opportunity to share information about the range of activities that our organisations are involved in, as well as potentially the ability to help each other overcome some of the challenges we face in our work with learners in precarious or fragile contexts. I'm sure we will continue to network into the future, and I'll continue to blog about initiatives arising from these relationships.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all the panellists, our chair Maren Deepwell, and all the participants for their input into the session. I would also like to thank Lancaster University for contributing towards my costs for attending OER19, as my convening of the panel was related to my PhD in Higher Education Research, Evaluation and Enhancement.

Any comments?

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments box below - we'd love to hear from you if you are following this story!

About Gabi Witthaus

Open educator. Blogger at Art of E-learning. Learning design consultant at University of Birmingham. PhD scholar in Higher Education Research, Evaluation and Enhancement, Lancaster University. Previously Research Associate at University of Leicester (Beyond Distance Research Alliance and Institute of Learning Innovation); Learning and Teaching Facilitator at Loughborough University; Distance Learning Manager at Bradford University School of Management. Qualifications: Masters in Training and Development (USQ, Australia); Masters in English Education (Wits University, South Africa), PGC in Mediation (Robert Gordon, Scotland), BA Hons in Applied Linguistics (Wits University, South Africa).

This entry was posted in Refugees and open education and tagged #OER19, Alessandro Caforio, conference, Gill Ryan, higher education, Kiron, Markus Wachowski, open education, Open University in Scotland, Paul O'Keeffe, refugees and asylum seekers, Uninettuno, University of Geneva InZone. Bookmark the permalink.

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Enabling equity and inclusion for asylum seekers and refugees through open education - Part II

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Well, the OER19 conference came and went on 10-11 April, and I am finally catching up. I wish I could express the joy that the OER conference sparks in me every year for the opportunity to meet up with my open education "tribe", and be stimulated, challenged and provoked into thinking in new ways about openness....

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Presentation to UFS HEHDR team blog post 

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Presentation to UFS HEHDR team blog post 

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Earlier this month, I was honoured to be invited to speak to the Higher Education and Human Development Research (HEHDR) team at the University of the Free State (UFS), South Africa on the topic of my open thesis. My abstract for the session was deliberately open-ended, as I wanted it to be more of a conversation than a presentation, and I was keen to hear the questions and comments from the Free State group, who have inspired me so much in my learning journey about the capability approach as a lens for social justice-oriented research in higher education.

Screenshot from the Brown Bag Lunch session with University of the Free State HEHDR team

The discussant for the session was Faith Mkwananzi, whose excellent book on higher education, youth and migration in contexts of migration I have cited numerous times in my blog series. It was very encouraging to hear her feedback on my research so far. She noted the importance of my research focus on online higher education for refugees, citing the critical disruption that refugee students had endured to their education during the pandemic, and highlighting the need for alternative forms of learning for this under-served group. She also felt that an open thesis was a very fitting approach for this topic, as the process of open research is inclusive, accessible and collaborative. We then had a Q&A session, which I summarise below.
Beyond the ethical issues you have discussed, what are some of the key challenges in doing an open thesis?
One challenge I have found is that, as soon as you announce you are doing something openly, you become accountable to the community that follows your work in a way that you did not feel so keenly before. This is why I spend quite a lot of time on activities that are not directly related to writing my thesis, such as blogging and speaking at events, and I sometimes worry that I will never finish my thesis... However, it is a privilege to have the time to do this alongside my part-time work, and I find it very rewarding to be able to engage so much with other researchers and practitioners as I go along.
What would be the publication implications if you decided to publish some of this work in a journal at a later date?
I always try to publish in open-access journals where possible. Many of these journals do accept (and indeed encourage) work which has been previously shared in a different format such as via blog posts, as it indicates a degree of engagement with a community of interest and informal peer review. An article, a thesis and a series of blog posts are all different genres with different (albeit overlapping) readerships, and so the works would not be competing with one another.
Is there a risk of your work being stolen?
The advantage of blogging as you go along is that any ideas you share publicly are time- and date-stamped to your name. Blogging and publishing under an open licence just means that I am giving other people permission to reuse my work in different ways, following the conditions of my CC-BY-NC-SA licence, which include attributing the work to my name, not using it commercially, and re-sharing it under the same licence. There have been cases of open-access theses and articles being stolen and sold online, but, as noted by the authors of this LSE blog post, What happens when you find your open access PhD thesis for sale on Amazon?, the Creative Commons (Non-Commercial) licence is robust enough to force a large online seller like Amazon to take down such fraudulent sales.
What role does your supervisor play in your open thesis?
My supervisor, who shares my research interest in finding ways to foster greater participation in higher education through online and distance learning, has been very supportive and encouraging about my open research approach. Also, before starting on the study, I obtained approval from the research ethics panels at both the University of Lancaster (where I am doing my PhD) and the University of Leicester (where my case study is based). Both panels approved my plan to do an open thesis.
How many Sanctuary Scholars are there (in the case study programme), and how did you select the nine participants?
The university has been enrolling two intakes of approximately six Sanctuary Scholars per year since September 2018. At the time I put out my first call for research participants, there were 18 Sanctuary Scholars; there are now around 30 (some of whom have graduated). I did not select my participants - all the Sanctuary Scholars were invited to join in my research, and so the ones who responded became a self-selecting sample. As it is a distance programme (in the traditional, pre-pandemic sense of the word), the Scholars are located all around the world, including one person who is in a refugee camp in Malawi, and some who are in urban settings in Europe.
Can your research participants access the Google Docs with your work-in-progress and comment on them, and would their comments be visible to other viewers?
Yes anyone can comment on the Google Docs, and can choose to do so anonymously or under their name. As my research participants are Master's students in a programme on Politics and International Relations that includes modules on human rights, there is the possibility that some of them will be engaging with the capability approach anyway in their studies. However, I don't want to make extra demands on the Sanctuary Scholars, especially as several of them are having to manage very difficult life circumstances at any given time, and so I would not put pressure on them to contribute.
Do you have any advice on how to encourage deeper participation by participants in in participatory research studies?
As mentioned above, my research participants are often struggling to manage their time to complete their own Master's programmes, under very difficult circumstances, and so I am very grateful to them for taking time to be interviewed and to give me feedback on selected extracts pertaining to their interviews. I have made them all aware of my open dissertation site and invited them all to contribute as much as they want to, but I don't think it would be fair of me to expect them to put a lot of time into my study. So I don't have any advice, but I would say I think participatory research is easier to carry out in situations where there is a very clear, direct benefit for the participants. (In my case it's an indirect benefit, as my study will hopefully have some impact on the provision of higher education for refugees globally.)
Could an open dissertation be a form of storytelling? It captures the experience of the researcher, and so it could be a form of storying. What do you think?
This is a great way of seeing it. Many of my fellow PhD students blog about their learning journeys (see for example, Sandra Flynn's Pathway to PhD, Helen DeWaard's Step by Step, and many of my other peers in GO-GN, the Global OER Graduate Network). I think we are all storytelling as we go along. I know there is more to storytelling from an epistemic justice point of view and I'm reading about that now, in preparation for my upcoming blog post on "equity from the middle" in higher education, so I may return to this concept there, or in a future post.
When you get loads of different comments from people, how do you decide which feedback to implement and which to ignore?
That would be a wonderful problem to have, but unfortunately it hasn't arisen for me yet!
In conclusion...
I would like to end with a thought-provoking comment from Faith, who suggested that as part of my process of writing an open thesis, I should consider the experience from a capability perspective and think about the kinds of opportunities it affords. This could lead towards me helping other researchers in carrying out open research. Thank you for this idea Faith - I have to say that, once you start seeing things through a capability lens, it is difficult not to apply it to everything you do, and so I think this might be a natural evolution of my work.

The session recording is available on YouTube (Comments and Q&A starts around 27 minutes in.) Inspired by this session, I have now compiled all the blog posts in my capability series to date into a single Google Doc, with a single reference list. For ease of reference, the doc is also available from my Open Dissertation site. It is not yet complete - there are still two blog posts to go in the series, so I will add those to the Google Doc when they're done. The document is open for comments, so please do add your comments and questions. I look forward to the challenge of being overwhelmed with feedback - not only on the Google Doc but here in the blog, and on Twitter ... Many thanks in advance!

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A conversation with the UFS HEHDR team about open theses, higher education and the capability approach

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Earlier this month, I was honoured to be invited to speak to the Higher Education and Human Development Research (HEHDR) team at the University of the Free State (UFS), South Africa on the topic of my open thesis. My abstract for the session was deliberately open-ended, as I wanted it to be more of a...

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Student engagement among displaced learners in online higher education: an emerging capabilitarian model

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In this post, I would like to share the presentation that I gave at the EADTU’s Innovating Higher Education 2022 (I-HE2022) Conference in Athens on 19 October 2022. The talk fell under the co…

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Exploring the Capability Approach as a Social Justice Framework for Researching Higher Education in 12 blog posts (Zenodo, Apr 2022)

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Exploring the Capability Approach as a Social Justice Framework for Researching Higher Education in 12 blog posts (Zenodo, Apr 2022)

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Witthaus, Gabi

This working paper contains the full texts from all my blog posts on the capability approach and higher education published between 10 May 2021 and 12 April 2022. I wrote these posts as a way of developing and sharing my thinking about the social justice principles underpinning student engagement in online higher education for my PhD thesis, and am sharing my work-in-progress as an open thesis.

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Exploring the Capability Approach as a Social Justice Framework for Researching Higher Education in 12 blog posts

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This working paper contains the full texts from all my blog posts on the capability approach and higher education published between 10 May 2021 and 12 April 2022. I wrote these posts as a way of developing and sharing my thinking about the social justice principles underpinning student engagement in online higher education for my PhD thesis, and am sharing my work-in-progress as an open thesis.

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Presentation to UFS HE & Human Development Research (HEHDR) team (Online, Aug 2021)

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Presentation to UFS HE & Human Development Research (HEHDR) team (Online, Aug 2021)

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I-HE2022 Conference Recording (Athens, Oct 2022)

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I-HE2022 Conference Recording (Athens, Oct 2022)

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Displaced Learners and Online Engagement in Higher Education by Gabi Witthaus

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Presentation to Learning Design in HE Network, (Dublin, Apr 2019)

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Presentation to Learning Design in HE Network, (Dublin, Apr 2019)

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Presentation to Kiron (Berlin, Dec 2017)

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Presentation to Kiron (Berlin, Dec 2017)

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Enabling equity and inclusion for refugees and asylum seekers through open education

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Academic Conference Panel - OER19, (Galway, Apr 2019)

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Academic Conference Panel - OER19, (Galway, Apr 2019)

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2023 paper on my thesis findings (in progress/ in press)

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2023 paper on my thesis findings (in progress/ in press)

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Witthaus, G. (2023 in press). ‘A capabilitarian model for online engagement derived from an exploration of the experiences of refugees in online Higher Education’, Online Learning Journal (Expected publication date: June 2023]

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2018 paper: Findings from a case study... (Kiron)

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2018 paper: Findings from a case study... (Kiron)

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Witthaus, G. (2018) ‘Findings from a Case Study on Refugees Using MOOCs to (Re)enter Higher Education’, OpenPraxis, 10(4). Available at: https://openpraxis.org/index.php/OpenPraxis/issue/view/33/showToc