“We are trying to coordinate an opportunity for refugee students to follow our electrical engineering courses. Due to the current stringent Swedish regulatory demands around academic education, we cannot officially enrol, nor officially examine, nor officially certify students at this moment. However, we have created a framework, parallel to the official electrical engineering education framework, that gathers all teachers that volunteer in having guest students following (parts of) their lectures.”
Also, it turns out that that Prof.Wouter van der Wijngaart who is behind the initiative is also doing research at the intersections of health and tech (audio snippet here). What do you think @markomanka and @Alberto, re: OpenCare track? Should I contact him and see if he might be interested in doing a talk/workshop at #lote5?
unfortunately regulatory barriers to enrolment of asylum seekers, and refugees, are quite common… not because they are explicitly aimed at them, but because regulators have set-up rules and requirements to govern and “balance” (<- this could be a subject of long debates) access to higher education in our Countries, and these rules have not considered special cases that are becoming visible to public opinion only recently…
So maybe, we should invite more than one person to talk of the effort of opening up education, to represent the full range of obstacles (and workarounds?) existing in our ecosystem… I know similar experiments are being planned in The Netherlands…
One obstacle, is the distinction between the “right to education”, and the “right to a certification of one’s own education”… so in most Countries you can work around to grant access to education, but it’s harder to guarantee certifications and professionalising educational activities (e.g. you can attend medicine classes, but you cannot join the rounds on hospital wards)…
Anyway, I diverge… would you think of a panel? Otherwise, calling just one person who has not found an especially interesting solution, may sound a bit arbitrary on our part…
