This course provides an exciting professional development opportunity to teachers who are working in schools or learning centres in conflict-affected environments. It is designed to help you to develop critical knowledge and the professional skills to cater for diverse learning needs of students, and to reflect on how social, political and economic circumstances can affect education. The course is co-designed with teachers and teacher educators who work in contexts of mass displacement.

Welcome to our CoMOOC!

To co-design the course, we held workshops in Mae Sot, where all of our contributing organisations worked together to design the course and develop the content. Courses with this global reach are often referred to as Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. But this one is different, because it was created through our co-design process, bringing together researchers from UCL with professionals from InEd and other organisations, working collaboratively to produce a meaningful, contextualised and relevant learning experience. When we designed the course, we embedded opportunities for teachers to share their knowledge with each other and build useful resources together. So we call it a Co-designed Massive Open Online Collaboration - a CoMOOC - because collaboration is both at the heart of how the course was designed, and central to how participants will experience learning on it.

The CoMOOC builds on a range of educational approaches and conflict-sensitive methods of teaching and learning that have been developed and practised by civil society organisations striving for access, quality and continuity of education in areas such as the Thai Myanmar border and Lebanon.

Our aim is to support you to:

• better understand the conflict-affected educational context;
• learn about theoretical frameworks that enable you to better understand your professional practice;
• adapt learning spaces to make education a transformative process;
• engage with your learners’ own experiences to help them respond to learning challenges;
• use digital platforms and technologies for creative problem solving; and
• improve the quality of teaching and learning in contexts of conflict and protracted crisis globally by sharing your inclusive pedagogical practices.

In this online space, you can share your practice and experiences with other participants and learn from theirs. The course promotes ideas about how to enhance inclusive pedagogies, teacher and children’s wellbeing and children’s holistic development, including academic and socioemotional learning. It aims to contribute to quality education in challenging environments, making education a transformative process.

Throughout the course we will ask you – wherever you are, and whatever context you are in – about your own situation and invite you to consider whether and how the approaches suggested in the videos might work for you.

One of the exciting things about being part of this course is finding other people, all over the world, who experience similar challenges to your own. Perhaps you will benefit from collaborating on devising solutions. They may work out differently in different contexts, but we can still share and learn from the issues we all have in common.

The activities throughout the course will ask you to consider your own ideas and plans, and then develop them further as you join and take part in the discussions. We encourage you to create your own journal to record your thinking as you go, for later reference. The educators will join these discussions while the course is live.

Of course, we must avoid revealing personal information about ourselves, other participants, or about learners, families and colleagues. Please do not provide any information that could enable someone to be identified, to ensure the protection of their privacy, and yours. 

While we have designed the CoMOOC for school teachers working in settings of conflict and displacement, there is much here to engage teachers in other settings, and professionals who may not teach but support learning in other ways. We encourage everyone to take part and draw on your own experience to contribute to discussions. We can all learn from each other, as teachers can experience similar issues, problems and solutions in all kinds of contexts and with varied levels of resources.

Learning outcomes

The main aim of this course is for you to gain the knowledge and skills that will help you to make education a transformative process for your learners. During Week 1, we focus on these learning outcomes:

• Modify learning spaces to respond to the diverse characteristics of children and young people;
• Collaborate and share effective educational practices and experiences using digital tools and platforms
• Apply relevant theories to support teaching practice (The Conversational Framework); and
• Design learning experiences creatively with available media and technologies.

Blended Learning

Not everyone who can benefit from this course has reliable access to the internet or a personal device they can use to connect. They may also not be fluent in English, and may prefer other languages (such as Burmese or Karen). For this reason, our co-design partners in Thailand and Myanmar are offering the course to teachers in their local areas in a “blended” way. They plan to work with groups of teachers face-to-face and to:

• Make the videos available offline to show to teachers ;
• Conduct in-person discussions to respond to the questions we pose (such as the Over to you discussion at the bottom of this step);
• Create paper-based versions of the online activities (e.g. using sticky notes on a wall for the exercise on the online app, Padlet: Reusing teaching ideas

These sessions will be facilitated by moderators who have already taken the online CoMOOC.

If you are working with colleagues in a face-to-face setting like this, we would love to hear from you, so please share your experiences in the comments.

Language

We have provided video subtitles in English and transcripts in Burmese and Karen in the downloads section at the bottom of each step, since these are some of the languages that our co-designers’ communities use. While auto-translation apps such as Google Translate are increasingly available, the apps do not currently work well for these languages. If you would benefit from translation, we would encourage you to explore whether Google Translate supports your language. If it does, and if you are using the Chrome browser to access the internet, page translation is built in. The newest versions of other browsers, such as Microsoft Edge, Firefox, and Safari, also have their own built-in translators.

Here are some support resources for these browsers:

• Google Chrome – Download the fast, secure browser from Google
• Translate pages and change Chrome languages
• Use Microsoft Translator in Microsoft Edge browser - Microsoft Support
• How to add the translate add-on to Firefox - Firefox Help
• Translate a web page in Safari on Mac

Some Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, also have translation capabilities. Please let us know how well these kinds of translation resources are working for you in the comments.

Over to you

In the forum discuss:

Do you plan to share what you learn here with other teachers in your local context? Do you think it might be useful to set up face-to-face workshops for your colleagues? What other help would you need to do that? What kind of experiences have you had with auto-translation apps?