We’d have been lost without digital technology during the Covid crisis. Most of our lives are now carried out online, from work zoom meetings to online shopping and communicating with friends and family.
Imagine if you’d recently moved to a new country, with a new language, how would you cope? Also imagine if you were female. The digital gender gap is most acute among migrant/refugees who, as both migrants and women face a double disadvantage that is consistently confirmed by research. There are also other barriers that migration poses to their learning process. There are cultural gender stereotypes as to the role of women, and discrimination (conscious and unconscious) that limits access to education.
Therefore, the Include Her project is so important. This project aims to increase the digital skills of HEI managers and academic staff so that they can empower female migrants in higher education. Trainers and teachers can take an innovative approach to encourage their migrant/refugee students as they develop their digital skills. The project aims to redress the gender imbalance in the digital sphere.
The first tangible results of the project will be the intellectual outputs which will be used by HEIs in their continuing education and outreach programmes with female migrants:
IO1 DIGITAL ROUTE MAP. This interactive, online tool will present indicators of digital competences, thus helping Migrant women to identify their current level of digital competence in each of the five DigComp areas.
IO2 DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT RESOURCES. These will be a focused yet flexible set of OERs which adapt existing best practice in digital skills education for use with migrant women in continuing education settings.
IO3 MOOC. This output will enable the OERS to be transferred into a state-of-the-art open access online course to allow women migrants to develop their digital skills in a friendly but effective digital environment.
We will be updating the progress on this project as it continues. For now we invite you to visit the website: www.includeher.eu