Co-designing and piloting an Integrated Digital Literacy and Language Toolkit for vulnerable migrant students in higher education

Abstract

This paper presents the process of co-design, co-production, piloting, evaluation and revision of an Integrated Digital Literacy and Language Toolkit for Vulnerable Migrant Students (VMs) in Higher Education (HE). The language element focuses on academic language skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking required for efective involvement in both the host society and HE learning; the acquisition and improvement of digital literacy skills enable VMs to successfully participate in, and contribute to, university and societal collaboration, creativity and content curation. The Toolkit resulted from the co -operation and collaboration of fve EU universities and was based on the ASSURE instructional design model. The Toolkit ofers a selfaccess, self- paced, non-linear, fully online set of ten stand-alone units which ofer a range of materials and activities to develop those skills pertinent to VM academic language and digital literacy needs. Evaluation by a group of VMs resident in EU countries highlight the positive impact of the Toolkit and validates the instrument as ft for purpose. Noteworthy aspects include its usefulness in supporting student autonomy, improving digital capabilities and academic language mastery,a positive experience of a fexible learning experience along with access to open resources of international scope and dissemination under the Creative Commons licence.