Collaborative Online Learning: Best Practices Workshop

Since the first day, Off University offers research projects and online courses to re-connect scholars and students at risk around the globe for academic learning, teaching, and knowledge production. We develop online pedagogies to learn together in small groups of intensive exchange while enabling participants to stay fully anonymous if necessary for their safety.

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 at Humboldt University by two scholars from Myanmar, which is open to students from and in Myanmar who are under close surveillance and at risk of detention for learning.