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https://www.dcu.ie/sanctuary/index.shtml

Paper on the early stages of the research project in the proceedings of the 2018 EDEN Research Conference http://www.eden-online.org/2018_barcelona/programme/

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A longitudinal, qualitative research study is underway to explore the experiences of the scholars in transitioning into higher education, in order that we can understand how to better support these scholars.

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Now that the system for supporting the scholars is in place it can continue as long as the small amounts of financial support for the scholarships remains available.

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Dublin City University has on-campus and off-campus (through DCU Connected) University of Sanctuary Scholarships for asylum seekers (and those with refugee status with DCU Connected Scholarships). The DCU Connected scholars study online and are supported by the Open Education Unit.

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Our biggest challenge was in making the university's wish to have these scholarships into a sustainability reality. There were a number of challenges in setting up the practical infrastructure for supporting the scholars. It also highlighted for us some issues that online Open Education/Access students face in a new way, which has made us push harder to enhance some aspects of how we provide open, online learning.

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DCU Connected - Online University of Sanctuary Scholarships

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DCU Connected - Online University of Sanctuary Scholarships

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For the last two years we have supported asylum seekers and refugees to study on UG and PG online programmes in Dublin City University (DCU Connected). They are supported by the Open Education Unit who already have a record of operating Open Education/Access programmes. We provide financial, logistical, and pastoral support for the scholars, who currently number around 12 or . A longitudinal, qualitative study is underway to explore their experiences of transitioning to higher education study, in order to learn how to best support them in the future.

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Hi Marcus, thank you for your contribution. Could you give more details about the MOUs with universities to give credit for the training that you deliver e.g the frameworks for the recognition of prior learning.

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We use OERs both for formal academic courses and non-formal courses. For formal academic courses OERs provide essential learning material, while the pedagogical environments in which they function (e.g. MOOC platforms) are rarely used due to connectivity constraints in the fragile contexts InZone works. For non-formal courses which do not provide for recognised academic credit (ECTS), we make sure that all OERs are locally downloadable, saving precious connectivity time to be used for completing assessments on-line. For courses we build ourselves to meet specific and contextualised needs in emergency contexts, OERs are used whenever possible, although due to the limited availability of OERs in languages relevant to the refugee context, the use of these materials is often limited.

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RefER - open educational resources for refugees project.
Reflecting on Transitions - OER for refugees and asylum seekers

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Moser-Mercer, B. (2014) ‘MOOCs in fragile contexts’, in Proceedings of the European MOOC Stakeholder Summit 2014. Lausanne: eLearning Papers, Open Education Europa, pp. 114–121.

Moser-mercer, B. (2014) Distance Learning in Refugee Camps, ACTED. Available at: https://d3gxp3iknbs7bs.cloudfront.net/attachments/715c73f9-7a69-4d2d-bdf0-110b45327f36.pdf (Accessed: 2 September 2018).

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Knoth, S., Lorenz, A. and Rampelt, F. (2018) ‘Make MOOCs count for higher education: Approaches to awarding ECTS Credits for learning in open online courses’, in Van Valkenburg, W. and Schuwer, R. (eds) OE Global 2018. Delft: TU Delft, pp. 1–5.

Suter, R. and Rampelt, F. (2017) ‘Digital Solutions for Alternative Routes Into Higher Education – Possibilities and Challenges of Digital Teaching and Learning Scenarios for Refugees: First Results From the Integral² Project’, in Proceedings of EDULEARN17 Conference 3rd-5th July 2017, Barcelona, Spain, pp. 4640–4645. doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2017.2024.

Witthaus, G. (2018) ‘Findings from a case study of refugees using MOOCs to (re)enter higher education’, OpenPraxis, 10(4), pp. 343–357. doi: https://doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.10.4.910.

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University for Refugees initiative:
https://www.universitaperrifugiati.it/en/default.aspx

HESD - Higher Education for Sustainable Development listing Uninettuno for SDG4 and SDG10:
http://www.iau-hesd.net/en/actions/3672/university-refugees-education-without-boundaries

GARITO, M.A. "A University for Refugees: Education without Boundaries", 2017 http://www.garito.it/allegati/8/CommonFiles/Articoli/default/218/University-for-Refugees-JMER20170623-1-Maria-Amata-Garito.pdf

Our speech at #JoinTogether Conference, at UN Headquarter in New York, January, 7th, 2019 (starting at 49:50 of the video) http://webtv.un.org/search/part-2-the-role-of-universities-in-achieving-sdg-16-/5987141930001/?term=&lan=english&cat=Meetings%2FEvents&page=3

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A co-production approach enables the voice of the refugee to be centred.

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Our approach is two-fold: using OERs as learning material for our academic courses, and producing our own OERs as public goods (see unige.ch/inzone for examples of e-learning modules). Using OERs has the potential to reduce the time to develop a contextualised and relevant course for low-resource refugee environments and thus allows us to invest limited resources in increasing inclusion. Our own public goods are produced for low-resource environments and thus make learning accessible to all

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Kiron was founded as a social startup in March 2015, with the aim of giving refugees around the world access to a university education and additional related options. In this way, Kiron supports refugees in facing the challenges of fleeing from their home countries and starting over elsewhere. (See https://kiron.ngo/about/where-do-we-come-from/)

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The University for Refugees initiative took into consideration different aspects that could impact on the effective success of the project. We provided scolarships for refugees and asylum seekers applying for credit recognition, in order to let them access for real to a higher education program. Our University is fully online, so we overcame the distance barriers by design; we managed to sign agreements with Italian Embassies and Institute of Culture in hosting countries for providing refugee students accessible exam sites (our exams are not online). We provided language courses both for university students and for any migrant or refugee signing in the University for Refugees portal. In specific sites (like in Milan Welcoming Center) we provided also in presence mentoring and tutoring on weekly basis. This actions are designed having in mind that competences, language skills and study titles are key factors in promoting a real inclusion in the welcoming country.

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OUiS: there are many identified gaps and challenges remaining. Our aim would be to create bespoke pathways into education and employment for New Scots, in partnership with the organisations supporting them.

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The OU's mission is to be open to people, places and ideas. It was set up to make higher education accessible to all. OpenLearn and OpenLearn Create - our OER platforms - make education accessible at pre-HE level also. A quarter of our OpenLearn learners do not have English as a first language and c75% do not have previous HE qualifications. We do significant outreach with partner organisations using OER to reach communities and individuals who may not consider themselves learners with our open learning champions programme.

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OUiS: one of our big advantages is the OpenLearn Create platform, wholly owned by the OU. This means that there are no issues with ownership and hosting if a project/funding comes to an end. The tools are also made available for continual re-use, remixing and updating of content with open source cc licence.

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OUiS: challenges are ongoing. The co-production model worked well and ensured the learner voice was central. However the OER was in English. We don't have the resource to produce OER in each relevant language, to meet the diversity of learning needs and levels. No one size fits all. Possibly the most pragmatic approach is to strive for maximum adaptibilty of OER - of content, format and accessibility.

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OU in Scotland: we have been involved in the RefER project, engaging with third sector organisations and integration services in Scotland to determine learning needs and gaps in resources for refugees/asylum seekers.
We have also co-created an OER  with the Bridges Programmes in Glasgow.

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Course creators, curriculum designers and assessment experts need to find a more synergetic way of collaborating on the integration of OERs into learning at all levels, primary, secondary and tertiairy eduction in fragile contexts and work closely with local education institutions to build capacity in fragile contexts.

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As we systematically use OERs in all of our courses we redeploy limited resources available for Higher Education in Emergencies to important pedagogical and cultural considerations that need to be taken into account when working in fragility. Resources thus become available for fine-tuning the pedagogical environment, translating learning materials, and increasing efforts for inclusion.

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The use of OERs is integrated in the InZone Learning eco-system, a student-centered virtual learning environment that leverages the skills and competencies of learners, peers, teachers and tutors to create a sustainable and contextualised and supportive space for learning in fragility. Due to the multiplicity of human resources employed in the environment both on-site and on-line, the model is scalable and sustainable.

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The most significant challenge is certainly the abundance of OERs in English, which requires significant contextualisation to be relevant to fragile refugee contexts. OERs pitched to an audience living in high-resource environments, irrespective of their quality, are not usable in extremely low-resource environments without rather significant additional efforts of adapting them to local connectivity and IT infrastructure and use on aging devices.

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A more standardized and most of all digital transfer process into traditional universities would be highly desirable. That could be improved by digital certificates, however formal and technical standards still have to be defined. Likewise e-Exams that would be independent from location and time remain an open questions for the future.

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Having Learning Agreements that guarantee the recognition of CP (credit points) from MOOCs at HEI is a proof that open education as reached and permeated the traditional educational system.

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With its own digital Campus Kiron has a platform to provide its MOOC-based Curricula together with other educational offers. Agreements with HEIs are made on a permant level and ensure the recognition of Kiron-CP (credit points) at a regular university. Although it remains uncertain how "open" the big MOOC providers will remain, given the increasing restrictions via pay walls.

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Main threshold was to prove that digital learning is equivalent to on-site studies. This has been achieved via a detailed and quality assured process to generate Learning Agreements with traditional HEIs.

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The study tracks that are Kiron's core offer to its refugee students consist of curated MOOCS. Due to meticulous QA those can be matched with traditional HEI-offers. Further, additional learning material is compiled to enhance study success.

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Scaling up, reaching a wider population, and providing more services (for example, professional experience recognition and certification, more mobile-friendly courses, smart support for refugees and migrants in accessing available social services in their hosting countries).
For this reason, Uninettuno widened its network, involving public administrations, research centers, IT enterprises, NGOs, international organizations like UNESCO, and designed REBUILD project, recently funded by EC under the H2020 program. The ambition of the project is to design, test and deploy a "digital companion", a mobile app able to dialog in natural language with migrants and refugees, with the aim of: 1. supporting them in accessing available services with a continuous support; 2. analyze their needs and their skills; 3. provide anonymized data to PAs and policy makers, for better orienting their decisions (budgets, service design) for enhancing the service offered to this vulnerable population.

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Our organizational model is designed for opening up higher education, democratizing the access to knowledge. We provide both full distance courses, with videolectures realized by university professors coming from Italian, European and international Universities according to their language, but also local, networked, distributed physical sites (called Technological poles) where students can meet their colleagues or their professors, where they can receive administrative support, have pc with broadband Internet connection, and a site for final exams. In this way, we reach both national peripheries, bringing the university all over Italy, and also foreign peripheries; for example, 8% of the students in our programs funded by University for Refugees initiative's scolarships come from a welcoming camp in Rwanda.

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Sustainability is a multifold issue. From a purely economic perspective, most of the scolarships for University for Refugees are provided by Uninettuno itself, approved by the board of directors after the proposal of our Rector, Prof. Maria Amata Garito, who strongly wanted to launch this initiative.
Other scolarships have been funded by a bank foundation (CARIPLO foundation), and this is a model that can be replicated.
From an "academic diplomacy" perspective, Uninettuno internationalization model foresaw since the beginning strong collaboration with not-Italian universities, starting with south-Mediterranean countries. Agreements with these institutions and collaboration with their professors allowed the design and development of common curricula, provided in several languages, realized using UNINETTUNO technological and psycho-pedagogical model. This led to mutual trust building and a recognized acceptance of Uninettuno role in the Euro-Mediterranean area; on this basis, further collaborations for supporting refugees in the Arab World and at international level in general can be foreseen.

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Having started this initiative on our own, funding is the first issue. We provided the first 50 scholarships using University budget, then we managed to have an agreement with a private bank foundation (CARIPLO) providing other 20 scholaships. Having the objective to scale up the initiative (in terms of both population and services offered), we managed to apply for European funding under H2020 program, and we've been successfully evaluated.
Another thing to address at the beginning was the "awareness raising": how to reach the target population? We managed this contacting directly welcoming centers and refugee camps in Italy. But the first student applying for a scolarship was a Syrian student, hosted in Lebanon. We asked ourselves "how did he find us", and then we found out: he was googling the name of one former professor of him, Fadel Sukkar, informatics professor at Aleppo University. And prof. Sukkar collaborated with us, recording a course about Informatics for our Computer Engineering Bachelor degree program. So Harout (that's the name of the first refugee supported by our initiative) found his former professor, his videolectures and the scientific contents produced by himself, then he discovered the University for refugee initative, and apply for it. Other students found us in the same way, looking for their former professor, and finding their videolessons recorded and available on our online learning environments.

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In 2015 we launched the University for Refugees initiative. Implementing ENIC-NARIC guidelines about the recognition of refugees' academic careers also in case of no documentation available, and creating an online platform for application and first curriculum screening steps, we gave opportunities to refugees from all over the world for accessing higher education. Please consider that Uninettuno provides programs not just in Italian, but also in Arabic, French, English and other languages. Furthermore, we provided language courses (in Italian and Arabic) also as a free mobile app, and licences for OLS language courses (usually provided for Erasmus+ students).