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. The whole, pre-viva version of my thesis can be read in the draft chapters section of my open dissertation site. I am now looking forward (admittedly with some trepidation!) to my viva in six weeks’ time. Throughout the process, I have shared my learning openly via this blog, my open thesis site, and through conferences, talks and workshops.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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