Earlier this year, the CoMOOCs team won the UCL Impactful Partnership with Public and Third Sector award as part of the Creating impact through Knowledge Exchange awards 2025. This was for our collaboration with civil society organisations in Lebanon and on the Thailand-Myanmar border in the co-design of professional development for teachers in conflict and crisis settings. The UCL team, in partnership with the Inclusive Education Foundation (InEd), an NGO that supports teachers in refugee camps, migrant learning centres and ethnic education providers along the Thai Myanmar border, is co-designing CoMOOCs (co-designed massive open online collaborations) with teacher trainers in these remote and under-resourced displaced communities. The CoMOOC, Understanding Education in Conflict and Crisis Settings, builds on the UCL team’s prior work in Lebanon (see Transforming Education in Challenging Environments), and has been developed as a form of South-South collaboration, with teachers globally sharing common problems and solutions for their very challenging contexts.
We celebrated together with our Myanmar partners on our recent fieldwork visit to Mae Sot in April and May, when we also engaged in an intense, week-long workshop with two strands of activity: firstly, co-designing the next CoMOOC in the series, which takes local teachers on the next step in their journey towards applying to the University of London’s online PGCE Teacher Development; and secondly, training a group of citizen social scientists to participate in the current ERICC-funded implementation research project.
The workshop was followed by the Education Everywhere 4 Conference at the Kamphaeng Phet Rajabhat University (KPRU) in Mae Sot, where Eileen and I were honoured to give a keynote.
The co-design of the next CoMOOC is now well under way, and we are working towards its release on FutureLearn towards the end of the year. In the meantime, the citizen social scientists are also preparing to collect data to inform the implementation study. We’ll have more to share on all these activities soon!
