Engaging learning: rethinking inclusion with insights from the margins (ALTC25 Revisited)

Posted on February 10, 2026 by Gabi Witthaus

Last October, I had the honour to give a keynote address at ALTC25. As my keynote will be radio-streamed again at ALTC25 Revisited on 25 February, I decided to revisit the talk and share a summary of it here for anyone who is interested. You can watch the keynote on ALT’s YouTube channel (link at the end of this post), and the slides are available here.

Snapshot from a classroom in a migrant learning centre in Mae Sot (Gabi Witthaus, CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The TLDR:

In my talk, I share stories from refugee-background learners, migrant teachers and my own journey towards becoming a learning designer in a global higher education (HE) context, to make the case for designing from the margins, not the centre. Drawing on the Capability Approach, I argue that behavioural, emotional, social and cognitive engagement all fuel each other – and that neglecting any one of them is risky, especially for students living with high “lifeloads”. I suggest three practical moves for more socially just and inclusive online learning: finding a kinder balance between flexibility and structure, embedding “warm” human support into course design and delivery, and intentionally creating accountable spaces where students can matter, be recognised and express themselves freely. A more detailed commentary on the talk follows. 

Starting from the margins

What does engaging online learning mean when we consider students living in precarious, crisis‑affected contexts? The photo above, taken in a classroom in a Migrant Learning Centre in Mae Sot on the Thai–Myanmar border, sets the scene: a well‑thumbed, Pacific‑centred paper wall map sits alongside an equally well‑used computer. That map prompts us to ask who is really “on the margins” here; in a setting many of us in well‑resourced HE institutions in the Global North might label “peripheral,” this classroom is in fact the hub. For me the image is a quiet provocation: it invites us to feel, even briefly, what it is like when we are the ones at the edge of someone else’s map – and then to ask what that might mean for how we think about inclusion, centre and margin in our own designs.

My starting point, from many years of experience as a learning designer, is that: (a) online learning design is usually good design for all modes, and (b) designing for the most challenged learners tends to improve the learning experience for everyone. ALT members will know that there is plenty of evidence for both of these notions, and that the latter is one of the fundamental principles of universal design for learning (UDL).

I then situate myself in the story. I grew up as a white child in apartheid South Africa, thinking I had a pretty ordinary childhood, but over time realised the unjustified privilege built into that “ordinary” life. An exchange year in Switzerland was my first major wake‑up call, followed by adult literacy work in the NGO sector back in South Africa, which aimed to support adults who had been denied a decent education through the apartheid regime’s iniquitous Bantu Education Act. Later, my own distance learning experience turned me into an online learning enthusiast and led me to wonder about the possibilities for online education as an instrument for widening participation. 

That personal arc led me into the area of research I have been engaged in for the last ten years: trying to make sense of the barriers and enablers to online education for people in contexts of displacement and protracted crisis, and seeking ways to widen engagement in online HE/ professional development for people in such settings. My PhD research (see thesis and earlier blog posts) investigated student engagement on an online Master’s programme run by the University of Leicester; my research participants there were displaced people holding Sanctuary Scholarships and studying from around the world.

Subsequently, I joined UCL as a research fellow. Our small project team works in partnership with an NGO, the Inclusive Education Foundation, on the Thai–Myanmar border, researching and developing Co-designed Massive Open Online Collaborations (CoMOOCs) aimed at teacher professional development in displacement settings.​ The research is part of the RELIEF 2 project funded by the ESRC, and also has funding from the FCDO via the ERICC programme. (See our blog, CoMOOCs for Transformative Professional Development for more about that project.)

Taken together, these experiences have decisively shaped how I think about online engagement – and in the rest of this post, I share some of the key ideas and stories that I brought into the ALTC25 keynote.

Four kinds of engagement

The talk was framed around a four‑dimensional model of engagement – behavioural, emotional, social/collaborative, and cognitive – adapted from Redmond et al. (2018). A quick poll with the audience confirmed my expectations that HE tends to reward behavioural engagement most (turning up, submitting assignments, doing the “right” things), with cognitive next, and social and emotional trailing behind. The practice thus runs counter to a growing body of literature (including my recent research), which provides strong evidence that engagement in one dimension fuels engagement in the others, and disengagement in any one dimension can fuel disengagement across the board.​

This is the thread running through the talk: if we neglect emotional or social engagement, we shouldn’t be surprised if behavioural and cognitive engagement start to unravel, especially for students on the margins. To understand this from a social justice perspective, I draw on the Capability Approach from Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, and Melanie Walker’s (2006) seminal work in applying capabilities to the HE context. 

Capabilities, not just skills

According to Sen and Nussbaum, capabilities are not just personal skills and abilities that can be developed and practised: they are the real freedoms that are socially, politically and economically enabled. These freedoms enable people to achieve valuable “functionings”, such as being educated, healthy, or able to participate in society. The distinction matters because a student may have the ability to study without having the freedom to do so, thanks to political, economic, or social constraints. My example from apartheid South Africa, of people who physically could swim but were legally barred from public beaches and pools, makes this tangible.

I therefore ask: If we understand capabilities as both personal abilities and socially enabled freedoms, what capabilities are needed for online engagement in each of the four dimensions? We must acknowledge that universities can’t fix problems arising out of structural issues such as poverty, war, and state policy – but we can recognise that our learning design can either mitigate or compound those external constraints.​

Behavioural engagement: resilience and lifeload

I argue that behavioural engagement is underpinned by the capability of “educational resilience” (Walker, 2006): the capability to navigate study, work, and life; negotiate risk; persevere academically; and stay responsive to opportunities while adapting to constraints. Lifeload – the total pressure of everything in a student’s life, with university just one piece of that puzzle (Kahu, 2013) – becomes the central idea here. Covid‑era research shows that, when students were all learning online, they consistently prioritised lifeload over learning load, which confirms what many of us have observed anecdotally.​

The stories from my PhD research make this visceral. There was Julian, studying from a refugee camp in Malawi, without electricity or reliable internet, studying on a borrowed laptop. He successfully completed the four taught modules on the online MA, but when time started running out to complete his dissertation, he explained that “situations complicate me. Psychologically I am failing.” There was Sami in Malaysia, who had founded a school for refugee children. He worried about paying his rent while trying to read academic papers, describing the dizziness he felt when stress overwhelmed his concentration. There was Zain, a Syrian refugee in Berlin, who was homeless for a while during winter because couldn’t get a flat. (“No-one wants to rent a flat to someone with a beard like me.”) He used to go to a freezing train station to access the free wi-fi and download his course materials. Some of these students exited early with a certificate or diploma; most graduated with a full Master’s, but none of their pathways were straightforward.

Turning to the Thai–Myanmar border context, I share the astonishing story of a whole class of students “sneaking” out of a refugee camp, then walking miles through mountainous areas and forests to access electricity and wi‑fi in a nearby village, risking trouble with Thai authorities simply to engage in an online course. That is contrasted with the practical example of a collaboration with Arizona State University to pilot the use of the Beekee Hub/ Sunspot – a portable offline Moodle server – which allows people in a locally connected classroom to access course materials without wider internet infrastructure. 

These stories illustrate the profound desire of so many people in settings of displacement to learn online, alongside some of the often formidable barriers to engagement. My design recommendation here is to increase behavioural engagement is to find the kindest balance between flexibility and structure, for example by offering more flexible deadlines and clearer exit points (e.g., certificates, diplomas) without sacrificing the cohort‑based structure that supports social learning.

Emotional engagement: mattering and “warm support”

For emotional engagement, I focus on the capability of “emotional health”: students being able to experience emotions that support learning rather than being dominated by anxiety, fear, or trauma. The stories above illustrating behavioural engagement are already saturated with emotional struggle; the two are inseparable. This links to a body of literature about students’ need not just to belong but to matter (e.g., Austen et al., 2021) and the research suggesting that trauma is far more widespread among online learners than we often assume (e.g., Reinhardt, 2022).The call from bell hooks for a pedagogy that respects and cares for students’ souls as a precondition for deep learning is fitting here. 

My main design recommendation for enabling emotional engagement is to embed “warm support” into course design and delivery: this is the kind of support that sits between informal “hot” support (such as gossip, or WhatsApp groups) and “cold” support (such as formal institutional policies and programme handbooks) (Baker et al., 2022). Warm support extends to the tone and texture of the whole learning design, including clear navigation structures, the use of plain language, and prioritising the human voice. For example, in an experiment at Leicester University, when a programme team re-created the entire dissertation handbook as a series of short podcasts, this dramatically reduced student queries: students said that while they struggled to read the handbook, they were highly motivated to engage with the information that was presented in a “warm” and “human” manner through the voices of their teachers and other experts in the field.

Social engagement: affiliation, recognition, and accountable spaces

For social and collaborative engagement, I suggest that the key capability is, in Nussbaum’s words, “affiliation and recognition”: the ability to interact with others to learn and solve problems, while being treated with dignity and entering into relationships of mutual respect and trust. I argue that, although universities can’t control what happens in students’ wider lives, we can shape how affiliation and recognition are experienced within our courses, even online.

The voices from my research into student experiences on the online Sanctuary Scholarship programme again shed light on this point. Nadia’s description of discussion forums as “very, very helpful” because they put her with “other human beings” is exactly what any online educator would hope for. Maryam’s journey is more complicated, however: she initially dismisses forums as a waste of time because they don’t count towards the assessment, then gets excited when she reads about her classmates’ backgrounds on the forum, but then is suddenly reluctant to introduce herself, feeling that “I am nothing in comparison” to them. This is an unsurprising response, considering the well‑known social media dynamic of a heightened awareness of inequalities and different capabilities in online social settings. I found that even a simple icebreaker like “Describe the view from your window” could trigger a cascade of doubt and difficult emotions for some students.

Some people promote “safe spaces” to mitigate these barriers, but, as Elise Ahenkorah argues, truly safe spaces are probably impossible to create. I would go further and suggest that such spaces may even be ill‑suited to genuinely transformative higher education. “Brave spaces” are often proposed as an alternative, yet this notion tends to place the burden on those experiencing trauma to be “brave”, thereby failing to address the underlying problem. Following Ahenkorah, I instead advocate for “accountable spaces” (which I have discussed elsewhere in my blog and in a presentation to the Knowledge Exchange Network). These are collaborative spaces built on shared principles for working together, where facilitators explicitly acknowledge the fragility and complexity of the humans in the group, and where respect and recognition are actively modelled by staff. Well‑established approaches to collaborative work – such as deliberative democracy practices, World Café discussions, and “lean coffee” sessions – offer practical ways of beginning to enact accountable spaces in online education. The co‑design work on the Thai–Myanmar border illustrates how curriculum design itself can become a site of mutual learning, affiliation, and recognition.

Thus, my recommendation for increasing social engagement is to build accountable spaces in which students can feel both safe and answerable to one another as an online learning community, while they critically co‑construct knowledge throughout their courses.

Cognitive engagement: knowledge, imagination, and social justice

Finally, I argue that cognitive engagement is underpinned by Nussbaum’s capability of “knowledge and imagination”: the freedom to think, imagine, and produce academic and professional work that matters to oneself and to others, and to be an active inquirer without fear of reprisal or censorship. Again, the social thread is explicit in the formulation of the capability, and rightly so: none of us working in HE want to produce graduates who only gain something for themselves; we all want HE to equip people to better contribute to wider society.

In relation to cognitive engagement, I share in the joy of students like Kareem, who feels that the way he debates and argues “becomes part of your DNA,” and Mohsin, who says he simply loves the fact that he is “free to think” on his online Master’s programme. But I also surface the quieter tension in Nadia’s story: her careful skill in “knowing both sides” so she can tailor what she says depending on the audience, which was a survival strategy she had honed over her lifetime having grown up in an authoritarian state, but belied an undertone of self‑censorship in the online HE setting. That brings me back to accountable spaces: if students don’t trust the space, real critical inquiry is risky and likely to be avoided.

My closing argument is deliberately circular: the three recommendations I made for the other dimensions – finding a kind balance between flexibility and structure, embedding warm support, and building accountable spaces – are also my recommendations for cognitive engagement. In my view, universities are already very good at developing students’ cognitive skills – in the sense of  personal skills and abilities that can be developed and practised (capabilities in the everyday sense of the word). What is missing is deliberate attention to the real freedoms that are socially, politically and economically enabled – the social‑justice‑infused conditions that make deep cognitive engagement possible.

In conclusion, I suggest that when we design online learning that supports students’ capabilities not only for behavioural and cognitive engagement, but also for emotional and social engagement – especially for students at the margins – we are not just making better courses. We are modelling social justice in everyday practice, and in doing so, we are quietly expanding the possibilities for greater social justice in higher education and beyond.​

If you’d like to watch the recording of the original presentation – here is the link to view it on YouTube.

Many thanks to ALT for inviting me to present this keynote, and thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read this. Please feel free to post comments or questions below.

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CoMOOCs for Transformation: A Journey in Collaborative Teacher Professional Development

Posted on September 24, 2025 by Gabi Witthaus

Over the past two years, I have been working on a project with colleagues at University College London (UCL), where we have been blogging at CoMOOCs for Transformative Professional Development. In the process I have neglected my own blog, and so I thought it’s time for an update.

I’m privileged to be part of a wonderful team drawn from University College London (UCL) and the Inclusive Education Foundation (InEd) in Thailand, and we’re collaborating with over a dozen NGOs and civil society organisations along the Thai-Myanmar border to co-create online and blended teacher professional development (TPD) courses for educators working in contexts of conflict, crisis and displacement. In this post, I will give an overview of the work that we have been doing together and some of the highlights of the project so far.

The CoMOOCs team: Tejendra Pherali, Diana Laurillard, Elaine Chase, Eileen Kennedy & Gabi Witthaus (UCL); Greg Tyrosvoutis, Lawi Chan, Naing Win, Saw Sam San, Sa Phyo Arkar, & Layi Chan (Inclusive Education Foundation)

The CoMOOCs model: more than a MOOC

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been celebrated over the last 15+ years for opening up learning at scale, but their one-size-fits-all format rarely meets the nuanced needs of professionals working in contexts of displacement and crisis. In an earlier project, my UCL colleagues collaborated with teachers in forced migration settings in Lebanon to pilot an alternative approach, that of Co-designed Massive Open Online Collaborations (CoMOOCs). A key output of this project was the Transforming Education in Challenging Environments CoMOOC on FutureLearn, which was aimed at both local teachers in Lebanon and a global audience of educators working in contexts of displacement.

The project on the Thai-Myanmar border builds on the success of the Lebanon project and is further testing the concept of co-design in a different setting. We co-created the CoMOOC, Understanding Education in Conflict and Crisis Settings, with teachers, trainers and education providers along the Thai–Myanmar border during the course of 2024 and launched it on FutureLearn in January 2025. This CoMOOC is the first in a series of of three aiming to support teachers in contexts of conflict and crisis.

The course on FutureLearn has attracted educators not just from Thailand and Myanmar, but from around the world—each bringing perspectives from their own contexts. Teachers in refugee camps, migrant learning centres, and ethnic education organisations share distinct challenges, including digital exclusion, psychosocial challenges, and security risks. They also bring innovation, resourcefulness, adaptability, and the desire to make a positive, transformational impact on their communities, and these aspects are amplified through the sharing of ideas and examples in the CoMOOC environment. The interaction between participants, using tools such as Padlets and online discussion forums, has confirmed our belief in the value of social learning and demonstrated the value of South–South collaborations.

The co-design process

Unlike conventional MOOCs, CoMOOCs are crafted not just for, but with members of their intended audience. Launching the CoMOOC was the culmination of more than a year of collaboration—both in person and virtual—between UCL, InEd and partners. In the process, partners mapped out their organisations’ professional development priorities, video-recorded their own narratives and teaching vignettes to share, and debated their responses to some of the biggest challenges they faced in their particular education settings.

The co-design process is part of the professional development process for all partners. Personally, I have learnt an enormous amount from it. (I will write about this in a separate blog post.) It has required radical openness—bringing educators, community leaders, and academics together as equals; foregrounding local knowledge and good practice; and sharing the power to shape curricula and research. The resulting courses invite participants into active, collaborative spaces where they share experiences and create resources together, mirroring and expanding the collaboration of the co-design team in new contexts and locations.

We co-design because we know that context matters deeply. Our workshops with partners in Lebanon and Thailand have demonstrated the importance of this approach, with participants identifying core themes, such as wellbeing and context-responsive pedagogy, and embedding these directly into course content. This philosophy of collaboration carries through to our research, our dissemination, and to the very structure of our online communities. Winning UCL’s Impactful Partnership with Public and Third Sector award in 2025 was a moment of collective celebration and recognition for our co-design model, and for the work done by our team together with all our partners in Lebanon, Thailand and Myanmar.

Flexible modalities, professional development pathways and recognition

While the CoMOOC is free and open-access at the point of entry, participation on the FutureLearn platform is limited to a number of weeks, after which participants would normally be required to pay to have continued access; and so we have also made the course available via an unlimited open access platform, OpenLearn Create.

Alongside the online versions, the CoMOOC has also been shared in face-to-face and hybrid delivery modes for teachers with limited connectivity along the Thai-Myanmar border. The course content for these participants is trilingual—offered in English, Burmese, and Karen—and has been embedded into regional and district-level teacher training curricula, ensuring that it becomes part of a structured TPD pathway.

Participants receive attendance certificates upon completion of each CoMOOC, and the entire series of three CoMOOCs is being designed to prepare teachers for entry into a Level 6 postgraduate certificate. A small cohort of staff drawn from the partner organisations has already gone ahead and almost completed their online PGCE in Teacher Development through the University of London. Such pathways contribute to the professionalisation of TPD, which is a significant aspiration of many educators in contexts of crisis and displacement.

Citizen Scientists and the CoMOOCs implementation study

With support from the UCL Citizen Science Academy, and with funding from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) and the Education Research in Conflict and Protracted Crisis (ERICC) consortium, a group of ten local early-career researchers are being trained and empowered as citizen scientists to conduct community-based research on the Thai–Myanmar border. The training programme combines conceptual work around topics such as ethics, research design and positionality, and hands-on tasks such as mapping community data sources, piloting research tools, and conducting interviews and focus groups with migrant teachers. It includes rigorous assessment and follow-up activities to support the citizen scientists’ continuing professional development.

This new cohort of talented researchers is now actively investigating our CoMOOC implementation—examining aspects such as acceptability, adoption, appropriateness, feasibility, fidelity, cost, coverage, and sustainability of the CoMOOCs. The data they gather will be jointly analysed by the citizen scientists themselves and the UCL-InEd team, enabling us to co-construct a rich qualitative picture of what has worked, for whom, and in what circumstances in the implementation of the CoMOOCs, and what could be done better.

In addition to enabling research to be conducted in areas that would be impossible for UK-based researchers to access, the citizen science programme is increasing research capacity within the displaced communities in the region. The participatory model ensures that the research remains ethical, contextually sensitive, and sustainable.

Next steps

Our journey with the CoMOOCs project continues: we are currently completing the development of the second CoMOOC with our partners on the Thai-Myanmar border, aiming to launch it in early 2026. CoMOOC 3 will follow. The lessons we are learning in Lebanon, Thailand and Myanmar have relevance far beyond these regions; indeed, they offer hope and practical professional development strategies for all contexts of crisis, displacement, and educational disruption.

Further reading

If you’re interested in finding out more about the development and implementation of the CoMOOCs project, this open-access paper, Pedagogical Approaches to Teacher Professional Development in Contexts of Mass Displacement: An Agenda for Research and Practice, published earlier this year, explains the rationale for the approach and describes our theory of change. More information is also available on our blog, CoMOOCs for Transformative Professional Development.

Invitation to participate

If you’d like to receive news from the CoMOOCs team and updates on our progress, the CoMOOCs team invites you to add your name to our mailing list. We will only use your contact details for occasional emails with updates about the CoMOOCs project.

Thank you for reading this, and as always, any comments on this post will be greatly appreciated!

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Creating accountable spaces in online higher education

Posted on March 5, 2024 by Gabi Witthaus

A while back, Chrissi Neranzti invited me to speak at a Knowledge Equity Network (KEN) webinar on 21st February on the topic of “creating accountable spaces for equitable participation”. KEN is a wonderful initiative co-founded by the Universities of Leeds and Pretoria, which aims to reduce inequalities through increased access to knowledge. Below is the recording from that session.

Video recording of the “Open Education: Creating accountable spaces for equitable participation” webinar

I shared the platform with artist George Sfougaras, who had connected with Chrissi during the publication of the inspirational, open-access book, Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures (co-edited by Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz), which has George’s beautiful “Little Hope” image on the cover. Upon discovering that they had a shared interest in family histories and the scars that are sometimes carried across generations, Chrissi had introduced George to a blog post by Canadian author, Elise Ahenkorah: “Safe and Brave Spaces Don’t Work (and What You Can Do Instead)”. Ahenkorah argues, from the perspective of a Black woman with intersectional lived experiences, that “safe spaces are impossible to create”, and the alternative “brave” spaces (in which people from minority groups are exhorted to bravely share personal lived experiences with privileged others) are exhausting. She recounts how she has learned to embrace accountable spaces in the work she does as a global inclusion strategist, focusing on social justice, anti-racism, and equity. George wrote a personal response to this in his own blog post “Accountable spaces“, and this provided the catalyst for the session.

Several coloured sticky notes on a flipchart with the heading "How we want to work together". The sticky notes have comments on them such as "Respect", "Ask each other questions", "Understanding and empathy", "Feel free to disagree, but no fighting!"
“How we want to work together” by Gabi Witthaus CC BY (Photo taken at a workshop with refugee educators in Mae Sot, Thailand, 5 Feb 2024)

I felt excited about the notion of accountable spaces as soon as I heard the term, and upon discussing these ideas with George and Chrissi, I knew that this perfectly articulated one of the key insights from my PhD research, which centred around the importance, the complexity, and the fragility of refugee students’ social and collaborative engagement in online learning. I had previously explored the idea of “Third Spaces” in a book chapter with Gill Ryan. Third Spaces are a postcolonial concept originated by Homi Bhabha and elaborated on by urban architect, Edward Soja. The essential idea of Third Spaces is that two or more different social groups (often those who are oppressed along with their oppressors) meet in a space in which every effort is made to subvert traditional power relations, and both groups actively seek to learn from one another and to create a shared, “hybrid” culture which is transformative for all participants. In our chapter, Gill and I had reviewed the work being done by three organisations supporting refugees in mobile and online learning, using Third Space theory as a conceptual framework. We found that organisations which prioritised openness, partnerships, and co-creation were more likely to foster learner agency, and that these features characterised effective Third Spaces for learning. Now thinking of these spaces as accountable spaces, in which all participants are committed to preserving the dignity of others, while putting effort into agreeing on principles for working/ learning together respectfully and honing their skills in doing so, helps me to make sense of Third Spaces in a more nuanced way, and I plan to explore this idea further in my research and practice.

I’d like to end with a plug for the good work being done by the Knowledge Equity Network. If you share their aims of reducing knowledge inequity and exploring new perspectives, solutions and opportunities to open access to knowledge for all, I highly recommend signing KEN’s global Declaration on Knowledge Equity!

Thanks for reading, and please add a comment if you would like to share your thoughts on accountable spaces.

Posted in My PhD, online education, Refugees in higher education | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Overcoming barriers to online engagement

Posted on December 22, 2023 by Gabi Witthaus

On 5 December, I gave a presentationon entitled Overcoming Barriers to Online Engagement through Care-ful Learning Design and Delivery at the annual EADTU webinar series.

Image credit: Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

Here I am sharing my slides and the webinar recording. My presentation starts around 31 minutes in, after the very interesting talk by Jon Rosewood and Karen Kear on active participation in synchronous online learning. Although we were talking about different contexts of online higher education, there was a significant overlap between our findings – namely that students’ engagement in online learning is highly influenced by their emotional well-being and their sense of social belonging. These are difficult aspects for teachers/ learning designers to take into account when developing or revising their modules, but there is evidence that if we don’t do so, some students are more likely to drop out.

I am very interested in taking this research further, and collaborating with other learning designers where possible, to learn more about how we can address issues of personal well-being and social belonging in online learning communities, especially for refugees and other underrepresented student groups. Please get in touch if you would like to chat!

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What do dignity and equity have to do with online engagement?

Posted on December 22, 2023 by Gabi Witthaus

Last month, I presented at a GOGN webinar on the topic of dignity, equity and online engagement. I was honoured to share the stage with Helen DeWaard, who gave a fascinating talk about her recently completed PhD on media and digital literacies in Canadian teacher educators’ open educational practices. Here I share my abstract and the recording of our talks, along with my slides. Many thanks to the GOGN team for inviting me to present at this session, and especially to Beck Pitt for facilitating the webinar and making the recording.

Defend Dignity
Photo credit: Terence Faircloth on Flickr: Mural by Shepard Fairey aka @obeygiant

Abstract: In this exploratory talk, I will share insights from my recently completed PhD research, in which I investigated the learning engagement of refugees and asylum seekers in an online Master’s programme through the lens of the capabilities approach. I will focus on Martha Nussbaum’s contribution to our understanding of dignity and equity in open online education. While the presence or absence of capabilities can readily be understood as markers of equity, Nussbaum’s argument that ten core capabilities are prerequisites for human dignity raises important questions for us as educators. Extending my thesis research into as yet uncharted territory, I will invite participants to explore with me the implications of the idea that, where students do not have the capabilities they need to fully engage in their learning, they are likely to experience a loss of dignity. We will reflect on the extent to which the task of designing learning for online engagement overlaps with the task of preserving students’ dignity, and will consider the implications for educators.

GOGN webinar recording, 15 November 2023
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Online Education Berlin 2023 Panel Presentation

Posted on November 23, 2023 by Gabi Witthaus

On 23 November I presented as part of a wonderful panel at Online Education Berlin, on the topic of “Expanding digital education for elderly, hard-to-reach and displaced learners”. My talk was on fostering learning engagement among refugees and asylum seekers in online higher education, and I shared some of the key findings from my thesis. [Post edited to add photo.]

The panel from left to right: Anna Grabowska, Daiana Huber, Erica Neve (moderator), Gabi Witthaus and Gavin Henrick
Posted in online engagement, Refugees in higher education | Leave a comment

Some reflections on supporting students’ capabilities for online engagement

Posted on November 1, 2023 by Gabi Witthaus

On 4th October, I presented a workshop on “Supporting Students’ Capabilities for Online Engagement” at the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities’ Innovating Higher Education (I-HE2023) conference in Istanbul. The aim was for participants to critically reflect on the learning design of their distance courses and to consider how it might both foster and frustrate students’ online engagement. The workshop was based on my PhD research, in which I created a capabilities model for inclusive online engagement, based on a case of refugees and asylum seekers in an online Master’s programme. I had presented on this research at the I-HE22 conference in Athens last year and contributed a paper to the conference’s special edition of the Online Learning journal. The paper summarised key findings from my PhD research and discussed the ways in which each of the online engagement dimensions (behavioural, emotional, social and cognitive engagement) can fuel further engagement across all four dimensions. This year, I wanted to start a discussion with academics about the implications for learning design.

FemEdTech Quilt piece by @PaulineRidley, CC 0. (Image chosen to illustrate the idea of social and collaborative engagement.)

In the workshop, we discussed the “4D” model of online engagement, in which engagement is conceptualised as having four dimensions: behavioural, emotional, social and collaborative, and cognitive engagement (adapted from Redmond et al., 2018). Student engagement is evidenced in practice by the presence of certain indicators. A few illustrative examples of such indicators follow:

  • Behavioural engagement: identifying opportunities and challenges, managing access to resources, and managing time around “lifeload”.
  • Emotional engagement: managing one’s own expectations, articulating assumptions, and investing emotionally in the subject knowledge.
  • Social and collaborative engagement: building community, creating a sense of belonging, learning with peers and relating to faculty members.
  • Cognitive engagement: thinking critically, activating metacognition, integrating ideas and justifying decisions.

In the workshop, we discussed the barriers to engagement that students might experience in relation to these indicators, and participants identified many of these. I then introduced the concept of the capabilities (in the sense of the term used by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum) required to engage in each dimension. Here I highlighted the fact that, by definition, each capability includes both skills that can be learned (Walker, 2006) and freedoms that are socially/ politically or environmentally shaped (Sen, 1999). The following table notes the underlying capabilities that I have proposed for each engagement dimension, and highlights this dual nature of each capability definition.

Engagement dimensionUnderlying capabilitySkills and abilities that can be practised/ learnedFreedoms that are socially or environmentally shaped
Behavioural Educational resiliencePersevere academically; be responsive to educational opportunities and adaptive to constraints;navigate study, work and life, and negotiate risk.
EmotionalEmotional well-beingExperience emotions that contribute positively to learning;Not be subject to anxiety or fear which diminishes learning.
Social & collaborativeAffiliation & recognitionInteract with others to learn new knowledge and solve problems;Be treated with dignity and enter into relationships of mutual respect, recognition and trust.
CognitiveKnowledge & imaginationUse imagination and thought to experience and produce academic and professional works of value to oneself and others;Be an active inquirer without fear of reprisal or censorship.
The 4D Online Engagement Model and Associated Capabilities (adapted from Witthaus, 2023a and 2023b)

I will illustrate the challenges for learning designers with reference to one of the engagement dimensions. In the above table, which draws heavily on work by Nussbaum (2003), Walker (2006) and Wilson-Strydom (2016), the underlying capability for social and collaborative engagement is the capability for affiliation and recognition. The key element of this definition, and indeed of all capability definitions, is that it refers not only to a student’s personal abilities, but also to social and environmental factors that may be outside of the control of both the student and the institution. Thus, while “the ability to interact with others to learn new knowledge and solve problems” is a skill that most students can develop with practice (if they don’t already have it), the ability “to be treated with dignity and to enter into relationships of mutual respect, recognition and trust” is, to some extent, contingent upon the intersectional characteristics of the student and the possible biases of other students and staff members towards these characteristics. So for example, a student may experience micro-agressions related to their race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation, age or ability status. There may also be environmental aspects, such as a lack of appropriate digital infrastructure for some students, or difficulties in navigating the VLE, which provide obstacles to positive interaction and relationship-building between students, or between students and staff, in the online learning environment.

The same process of analysis can be used for the other three engagement dimensions and their associated capabilities: in each case, the most challenging aspects for learning designers and teachers to address are likely to lie in the right hand column of the table. I don’t have all the answers as to how to mitigate these challenges, but I do know that these freedoms that are socially or environmentally shaped need more attention in the learning design process if we want to have any hope of increasing engagement (and thereby also retention) of displaced learners. I will be reflecting further on these issues in my panel presentation, Fostering Learning Engagement among Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Online Higher Education, at Online Educa Berlin on 23 November.

References

Nussbaum, M. (2003). Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice. Feminist Economics, 9(2–3), 33–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/1354570022000077926

Redmond, P., Heffernan, A., Abawi, L., Brown, A., & Henderson, R. (2018). An Online Engagement Framework for Higher Education. Online Learning, 22(1), 183–204. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v22i1.1175

Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Walker, M. (2006). Higher Education Pedagogies: A Capabilities Approach. Maidenhead: McGraw Hill Education.

Wilson-Strydom, M. (2016). A Capabilities List for Equitable Transitions to University: A Top-down and Bottom-up Approach. Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 17(2), 145–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2014.991280

Witthaus, G. (2023a). Refugees’ Online Learning Engagement in Higher Education:A Capabilitarian Analysis [Phd, Lancaster University]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17635/lancaster/thesis/2010

Witthaus, G. (2023b). Refugees and Online Engagement in Higher Education: A Capabilitarian Model. Online Learning, 27(2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v27i2.3762

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PhD finished, new chapter started

Posted on August 31, 2023 by Gabi Witthaus

It’s been a while since I last blogged, and a lot has happened since then. On 12th June, I defended my thesis in an online viva in the presence of three inspirational scholars: Sally Baker as external examiner, Melis Cin as internal examiner for Lancaster University, and Kyungmee Lee, my supervisor, who joined as an observer and shared in the celebration at the end. The screenshot below shows that moment, which will forever remain in my mind and my heart. It was the culmination of four challenging years of thesis writing, and a validation not just of my own research, but of the knowledge generated by so many other scholars in the area of online higher education for refugees and online engagement, upon whose work I built.

My thesis, Refugees’ Online Learning Engagement in Higher Education:A Capabilitarian Analysis  (Witthaus, 2023a), is available from the Lancaster Library, and an open access journal article (Witthaus, 2023b), which reflects some of my findings, was published in the Online Learning journal in June. My OpenThesis site is still available as an archive; I hope it will encourage other PhD students to develop their dissertations in the open too. All these outputs would not have been possible without the help of so many friends, family members and colleagues along the way, and I am hugely grateful for all the support.

In July, I started a new part-time position (alongside my University of Birmingham role) at UCL as Research Fellow – Education in Contexts of Mass Displacement. I have the immense privilege of working in a team with Tejendra Pherali, Eileen Kennedy, Elaine Chase and Diana Laurillard on a project that supports Teacher Professional Development for people in contexts of mass displacement. This is done through MOOCs which are co-designed and co-produced with teachers based in refugee camps who are deeply familiar with the particular local contexts in which the MOOC participants are teaching. One of the MOOCs that was co-produced in this way is Transforming Education in Challenging Environments, on FutureLearn. Kennedy et al. (2022) provide a wonderful description of this work, and this article by the Lebanese Studies Centre describes a workshop with the coMOOCs team at the Sonbola Learning Centre in Bekaa, Lebanon, in 2015. My role will involve facilitating the sharing of practices between teachers in refugee camps in Lebanon and in Thailand and along the Thai-Myanmar border. The coMOOCs are part of a larger project called PROCOL Lebanon, led by the Institute for Global Prosperity at UCL and funded by ESRC, which focusses on working towards inclusive and prosperous futures for communities impacted by mass displacement. I am greatly looking forward to meeting my colleagues from the wider team in London, Lebanon and Thailand soon, and will be posting updates here.

As always, I would love to connect with others who are doing similar research or development work in other contexts, so please do drop me a line if you would like to talk.

References

Kennedy, E., Masuda, C., El Moussaoui, R., Chase, E., & Laurillard, D. (2022). Creating value from co-designing CoMOOCs with teachers in challenging environments. London Review of Education, 20(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.14324/LRE.20.1.45

Witthaus, G. (2023a). Refugees’ Online Learning Engagement in Higher Education:A Capabilitarian Analysis [Phd, Lancaster University]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.17635/lancaster/thesis/2010

Witthaus, G. (2023b). Refugees and Online Engagement in Higher Education: A Capabilitarian Model. Online Learning, 27(2). Available at: https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v27i2.3762

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Findings from my research on refugees’ engagement in online HE: some implications for open education

Posted on May 3, 2023 by Gabi Witthaus

On a warm July’s day in 2019, I carried out the first interview for my PhD thesis on refugees and online higher education (HE) from the library at Lancaster University. The interview was with a young man (referred to by the pseudonym Julian in my research) who was located in a refugee camp in Malawi, and we talked about his experiences as a distance learner on the online Master’s in History, Politics and International Relations (HyPIR) programme run by the University of Leicester. Over the ensuing months, I interviewed nine other displaced learners in different parts of the world, all of whom had kindly volunteered to participate in my study. I am immensely grateful to the research participants, and also to Helen Dexter, who warmly welcomed me to conduct a case study based on the lived experiences of refugees who had received Sanctuary Scholarships for the fully online Master’s programme. The initiative has been going strong since 2018, when the HyPIR programme began routinely enrolling six scholarship holders in every biannual intake; to my knowledge, this was the first UK offer of Sanctuary Scholarships for distance learning.

Since that first interview, I have been on a profound learning curve, fuelled both by my discussions with the Sanctuary Scholars and by my growing theoretical understanding of online engagement and the Capability Approach. Throughout the process, I have shared my learning openly via this blog, my open thesis site, and through conferences, talks and workshops. I am now looking forward (admittedly with some trepidation!) to my viva in six weeks’ time. The whole, pre-viva version of my thesis can be read in the draft chapters section of my open dissertation site. 

While the focus of my PhD research was on the experiences of refugees and asylum seekers in a formal online Master’s programme, I have been thinking about how the findings might apply to open online education, especially initiatives aimed specifically at refugees (such as those offered by Kiron, UCL and Coursera), since open education can potentially help to scale up provision for such learners. This is important in view of the fact that there are almost 90 million displaced people worldwide, and that only 6% of young adults among them are enrolled in HE, compared with over 40% of young adults in the general population (UNHCR, 2023). However, there are significant barriers to access and participation in HE for forced migrants, including (but not limited to) lack of digital infrastructure and digital literacies, linguistic and cultural barriers, and challenges associated with trauma, anxiety and stress. (These are discussed in my thesis, in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2).

Below I give five “headline” practical findings from my research (taken from Chapter 9), all of which I think are also relevant to open education:

  1. Create opportunities in the curriculum for development of all the capabilities that underpin the four dimensions of engagement (behavioural, emotional, social and collaborative, and cognitive).
  2. Create an institutional (or course-level, in the case of short, open courses) culture of “warm support” (Baker et al., 2018) for students.
  3. Provide online induction programmes to help students learn to navigate the platform and to prepare them for online learning.
  4. Develop flexible, modular learning pathways, including recognition of prior learning.
  5. Consider establishing, or strengthening, institutional partnerships.

Over the coming weeks, I will blog about each of these recommendations, discussing how they might apply both in formal HE delivery and in open education contexts, and also considering the extent to which they might apply to the wider student body beyond forced migrants. In the meantime, here are my slides from my talk, Widening engagement in open, online education: a framework for creating meaningful opportunities to engage, which I presented at the OER23 conference in Inverness in April.

Comments on this post are welcome, as always!

References

Baker, S., Ramsay, G., Irwin, E., & Miles, L. (2018). ‘Hot’, ‘Cold’ and ‘Warm’ supports: Towards theorising where refugee students go for assistance at university. Teaching in Higher Education, 23(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2017.1332028

UNHCR. (2023). Tertiary Education. UNHCR. https://www.unhcr.org/tertiary-education.html

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Open Thesis submitted!

Posted on April 3, 2023 by Gabi Witthaus

Anyone who has been following this blog will know that it’s been a long haul, but I’m very happy to say that I have submitted my thesis for examination, under the title Refugees’ Online Learning Engagement in Higher Education: a Capabilitarian Analysis. The viva/ live defence is likely to be sometime in June. Below is the abstract, and I have posted the first six chapters in my Open Thesis site.

Abstract

There are almost 90 million forced migrants globally, many of whom could benefit from online higher education; yet evidence suggests extremely low retention rates of displaced people in online learning. Since retention is often seen as being linked to engagement, this study aimed to understand the nature of student engagement by displaced learners in online higher education (HE) and to identify practical ways in which higher education institutions (HEIs) can support displaced learners to engage in online learning. The methodology included both empirical and theoretical components. The empirical study focused on a qualitative analysis of the lived experiences of ten online Sanctuary Scholars enrolled on an online master’s degree with a UK university. The theoretical analysis involved integrating concepts related to online engagement from the HE literature with those from the Capability Approach. A thematic analysis of the empirical data found that, while conversion factors such as trauma and “lifeload” presented obstacles for all the Sanctuary Scholars, some graduated, whereas others withdrew from the programme without completing it. The findings point to a nuanced web of interactions between resources, enablers and constraints (positive and negative conversion factors), capabilities, engagement and personal agency for each research participant. The original contribution of this thesis is that it proposes a Capabilitarian Online Engagement Model, which shows how engagement along four dimensions is underpinned by specific capabilities; it also illustrates how engagement fuels the capability for further engagement and highlights the role of student agency. The study contributes to theoretical understanding of displaced learners’ engagement in online learning, while practically, it offers insights to HEIs for fostering online engagement. Socially, the thesis adds to the growing body of open research in the social sciences.

Sharing at OER23

This week I will be sharing the implications of my findings for the design and delivery of open education at the ALT OER23 conference. Updates to follow, but in the meantime, comments are welcome as always!

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