The real cost of teaching in a refugee camp: Asking the difficult questions

This article asks difficult questions about higher-education courses provided by Western institutions to people living in refugee camps. It critically examines a blended-learning approach that incorporates a massive online open course (MOOC) into a scaffolded higher-education program—the University of Geneva’s Connected Blended Learning model—in the Kakuma refugee camp. It assesses the effectiveness of this approach in an accredited University of Geneva human-rights law course, which ran in the Kakuma camp from 2017 to 2020. On the basis of the long experience of the course leaders and research carried out with students who participated in the course, the article explores ways of improving this model by answering difficult questions about the real cost of teaching in a refugee camp. This paper was co-written by a professor, a researcher, and students who were involved in the course, two of whom are refugees living in Kakuma refugee camp.