This year TeachSurfing accomplished an important milestone: we launched our e-VELP program, a university accredited online course for young migrants and refugees. e-VELP aims to train young migrants and refugees, to help them tap into their talents, share their knowledge and culture.

The online learning program started on the 17th of November with an onboarding event which included participants from several different countries. This year we had overall 24 participants from 4 countries: 13 Volunteer Educators (VEs) motivated to learn and offer workshops and 11 Volunteer Educator trainers (VE-Trainers), who are more experienced trainers assisting VEs in their journey.

“The online training is going very well, the VEs and VE-Trainers are working through course content, including reading, taking quizzes and conducting individual or group activities. We created weekly workgroups both for VEs and VE-Trainers through which the learners can raise their questions and support each other in their learning journey. I was impressed that the volunteer educators got so engaged with the course content and they gave positive feedback.

An exciting aspect of the e-VELP program is its international context. Learners across 4 countries meet, exchange, and learn about each other’s culture and background. It’s very fulfilling to see we already achieve our goal in the process of training VEs: we bridge the cultural gap through knowledge exchange and personal contacts.”

Good news! Stay tuned for next year because we are broadening our project! Once we improve our content, we aim to publish the course so that it can be available to everyone in the TeachSurfing community. Right now, we just wanted to focus on migrants and refugees and give them the platform to share their knowledge, stories, and cultural background.