The last EDEN NAP webinar was held on 19 April 2017. It focused on the question of how open education, and in particular MOOCs can 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 employment market is a strategy to 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”
The current Erasmus+ project MOONLITE (Massive Open Online courses eNhancing LInguistic and Transversal skills for social inclusion and Employability) aims to address the question of how open education, in particular MOOCs, can offer viable solutions for refugees and contribute to better integration and improved employment prospects.
The recording of the webinar can be accessed here.
The discussion is continued on MOONLITE’s facebook group.