Winner – Best Lightning Talk

MacIsaac 2019 [Except where noted in film credits] CC (4.0) licensed BY-NC-ND

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Breaking into School After Hours:

One Educator’s Unconventional Approach to

Connecting Refugee and Non-Refugee Undergraduate Students

Abstract for Lightning Talk

This study is about one international undergraduate course. The digital “classroom” was built in the learning management system Moodle, accessible via the Internet. The students, who were refugees living in Kenya or Thailand and non-refugees living in Canada, had unequal access to the Internet to connect to the online course. For some, their Internet access was so limited it was like the “school being closed” most of the week. A glocal solution needed to work in three international sites and reflect the local contexts of the students. This study explores what happened when one educator decided to break the rules to help refugee and non-refugee learners connect via mobile phones to accomplish group assignments.