Making collaborative online learning possible for students at risk

Collaborative online classrooms are about creating open and accessible environments that encourage learning together. The digital space, with its much more porous national borders, offers many opportunities for international learning, but also carries the risk of surveillance and intrusion by authoritarian regimes and their mobs. Creating digitally safe online spaces is therefore very important, but has rarely been addressed by higher education institutions. What can academics do to protect their students from this threat? And how can we remain open in our approach to teaching and use collaborative online learning methods while creating digitally safe(r) online classrooms?

In this three-hour session, we will discuss different aspects of secure online teaching and learning with a real-life example: an online seminar on transitional justice offered by two scholars from Myanmar at Humboldt-Universität. Their course is open to students from and in Myanmar who are under close surveillance and at risk of detention for learning.

The workshop covers

• the basics of digital care in the online classroom
• online learning methods and tools from the digital security perspective
• best practice for safe online teaching that is collaborative, international and interactive

It is designed for lecturers and administrative staff at institutions of higher education who offer online education on contested topics to an international group of students, including students or scholars at risk.

This workshop is organized in the framework of the Circle U. COIL initiative and sponsored by the German Academic Exchange Service. It is facilitated by the Off University learning designer Bengi Aslan and the digital self-defence expert Anna Passlick.