Co-Creating Learning Design
LINK offers the university a comprehensive suite of competencies by helping academic environments "unpack" their needs and ensure that educational design supports the specific learning goals of each certificate.
The collaboration is grounded in a modern approach to pedagogical co-creation. In autumn 2025, Crina Damsa was invited by Svein St?len to advise on the pedagogical design of the overall program. As the plans for the first pilot sites became clearer, she saw that GUA needed dedicated learning design support. This is how Mirjana Coh entered the project: as the person who could translate GUA’s ambitious academic and humanitarian goals into a concrete course structure, using LINK’s experience with ABC learning design and digital teaching resources.
By the time Mirjana met the GUA-team, they already had:
- strong content expertise in mental health and psychosocial support,
- a clear sense of the pilot context
- an idea of how the certificate should be positioned and organised within GUA.
What they did not yet have was a shared, structured picture of:
- how the certificate should be broken into parts,
- what kinds of learning activities students would actually go through, and
- how different partners’ contributions would fit into one coherent pedagogical design.
Mirjana’s ABC learning design workshop was set up to address exactly this.?
The task for the day was to
- start from what the team already knew such as purpose, target group, context,
- break the certificate into smaller, manageable components, and
- map out the types of activities learners would engage in to achieve the intended knowledge and skills.
Using the physical ABC cards and storyboard, the team worked through what a typical week might look like: which activities would fit where, how to combine asynchronous and synchronous elements, and how to ensure that each activity deliberately contributed to learning outcomes. This process allowed them to “see” the student journey and discuss design decisions using a shared vocabulary.
The workshop also created a bridge to LINK’s production experts. Because the team already knew they wanted video materials, the insights from ABC-workshop became a basis for the next step: meeting with Lars Lomell and LINKs production team to decide what kinds of videos were needed, in what formats and lengths, and how video component should support the underlying learning design rather than exist as standalone lectures.
– The ABC method proved highly adaptable to non-traditional formats like professional certificates, helping maintain UiO’s high academic standards while making them “stackable” and internationally recognized, including by partners like UNESCO, reflects Mirjana.
This collaboration highlights GUA’s openness to guidance, as the team actively invites LINK’s constructive challenges to reshape traditional academic practices into more learner-centred, context-sensitive designs.
The Power of ABC Learning Design
The ABC method uses physical cards and storyboards to create a shared vocabulary for learning activities and to visualise the student journey. For the GUA team, this process was transformative. It prompted a shift away from traditional, long-form university lecturing toward a more student-centered, interactive model.
– For us scholars working within the Global University Academy, the learning design training was essential in shaping an educational programme that is responsive to the realities of refugee and displaced learners. The ABC learning design method supported a shift from content-focused teaching to carefully sequenced learning experiences that foreground collaboration, inclusion, and contextual sensitivity. This process enables teaching programs to translate psychological and psychosocial expertise into pedagogical choices that respect learners’ lived experiences and support meaningful and accessible teaching in displacement contexts, explains Dr. Gulnaz Anjum.
By mapping out the learner experience, the team could identify the right balance between asynchronous learning, synchronous sessions and collaborative exercises. Through thoughtfully designed learning content, GUA has adapted high-level academic content into a format suitable for vulnerable learners by chunking knowledge, introducing flipped classroom method and role-play, and involving local tutors and mentors.
– This collaborative pedagogical structuring ensures that the MHPSS certificate is not just a top-down academic exercise, but a community support tool that empowers refugees to be protagonists of their own well-being, emphasises Mirjana.
Why Shorter Videos Matter
Using smaller chunks of video improves learning retention by aligning educational content with the cognitive limits of student attention and by providing a structured path for knowledge absorption.
Based on reflection and expert advice within the project, this approach functions in several ways:
- Maximising attention span
Five to six minutes is considered an effective duration for retaining a learner’s attention. Moving away from traditional up to one-hour lectures helps prevent learners from becoming overwhelmed.
- Facilitating knowledge absorption
Breaking content into smaller chunks gives students time to absorb key concepts before moving on to readings or synchronous sessions. The material becomes more “absorbable” and easier to digest, which is particularly crucial for learners in high-stress environments.
- Shifting from information dumping to storytelling
Shorter videos require teachers to move from “passing the knowledge” through hours of speaking to a more deliberate storytelling process. This entails “killing their darlings” and prioritising only the most essential information, making content more impactful rather than merely extensive.
- Reducing misinterpretation
Designing videos to be shorter and more accessible helps reduce the risk that students will misinterpret complex terms when learning independently, especially when they are geographically distant and working through a screen.
This reflective exercise of shortening and modifying content is a vital pedagogical tool for ensuring that high-level academic rigor is successfully translated into formats that genuinely support learning.
A Global Initiative with Local Impact
The pilot project for GUA’s certificate in Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) is currently focused on Jordan, specifically refugees in stable camp environments. Led by Professor Beate Seibt and the Solidarity Hub, the initiative is built on a human rights-based advocacy approach.
Key features of the GUA initiative
- Contextualisation and localisation
The program moves away from standard Western clinical models, addressing mental health through a socially constructed lens that respects local meanings and expressions of trauma.
- Global collaboration
The project involves a broad network of institutions, including Yale, the University of Hamburg, Bard College, the University of Geneva, and local partners such as the German Jordanian University and NGOs like Save the Children.
- Removing barriers
By securing donor funding and providing stackable micro-credits and certificates, GUA positions education not as a luxury, but as a tool for social change and mobility.
Understanding Local Needs
To ensure that its MHPSS content is culturally sensitive and practically relevant, GUA follows a rigorous process of contextualisation in the Jordanian setting.
Needs Assessment
Between August and December 2025, the team conducted a comprehensive needs assessment that included:
- Expert consultation
Nine semi-structured interviews and multiple board meetings with international organisations like the UN, Red Cross, Save the Children, and local partners in Jordan helped identify specific field needs and employability skills.
- Direct learner input
Focus group discussions with refugee learners in Jordan brought in the learners’ own voices and realities of living in camp environments.
- Strategic partnerships
Save the Children serves as a key partner on the ground, providing community centres where students access the curriculum and work with local tutors and coaches.
Shifting from Western to Socially Constructed Models
GUA deliberately expands on standard Western clinical psychology and a narrower “diagnostic tool” approach. Instead, the content is framed through:
- A well-being perspective
Rather than relying on clinical labels or pathologising mental health, the course focuses on what it means to be safe, protected, and healthy within specific social groups.
- Socially constructed meanings
Concepts are introduced with room for locally constructed interpretations. For example, trainers learn to recognise psychosomatic symptoms, such as back pain or sleeplessness, as valid expressions of distress in communities where directly verbalising sadness or stress may be taboo.
- A human rights framework
The methodology is built on a human rights-based advocacy approach, emphasising the right to a life with dignity and inclusion in power-sharing and decision-making.
Cultural and Linguistic Adaptation
The curriculum is further adapted to resonate with students’ lived experiences:
- Localised case studies
Case studies used in classroom discussions are derived from the local context, rather than imported examples from unrelated settings.
- Linguistic inclusivity
Recognising that language can be a barrier, GUA avoids exclusion by offering all content with translations and subtitling tailored to learners’ competence levels and needs.
- Vetted translations
While technological tools assist with transcription, all materials are vetted by people on the ground who understand local nuances and can ensure sensitivity.
Stackable Credits
Stackable credits allow displaced learners to accumulate certifications over time.
Although the initiative is currently in its pilot phase, the long-term vision is for these stackable credits to become degree-awarding, creating formal pathways to higher education that are often inaccessible to refugees.
– These certifications can also support employability and integration into new communities. Learners can combine different types of certificates—for example, pairing a psychological support course with community-building or technical skill programs, says Fernanda.
Unlike many professional certifications that cost a lot of money, GUA provides these opportunities at no cost to refugees by securing donor funding. This is a formalised way to document and validate learning across institutions and borders. In partnership with UNESCO, GUA can issue these micro-credentials as certified declarations.
We will be able to offer a recognised record that a learner has completed a specific number of credits—documentation that holds value in the real world.?
For people who may have lost access to previous academic records due to displacement, these certifications provide a new, credible starting point.
– Beyond academic and professional benefits, these systems also bring social and physical advantages. For some refugees, participating in educational projects is one of the few ways to gain physical mobility, for example by leaving camps for educational visits. Education becomes a social tool and a chance at a different reality, helping refugees become protagonists of their own well-being and of community support structures. In this way, GUA positions education not as a privilege, but as a human rights-based pathway toward a life with dignity, points out Dr. Gulnaz.
The GUA Team Behind the Pilot
The GUA initiative in Mental Health and Psychosocial Support (MHPSS) is driven by a small core team whose personal journeys closely mirror the project’s values: education as a pathway to dignity, mobility, and social change.
Professor Beate Seibt, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo
Chair, Solidarity Hub – GUA core team, Lead for the MHPSS certificate
Professor Beate Seibt is the central academic lead from the University of Oslo’s Department of Psychology for the GUA MHPSS pilot. A social psychologist by training, she has extensive experience working on migration-related initiatives, including earlier work with the Ukraine initiative that contributed to the formation of the Solidarity Hub.
Within GUA, she has been “front and centre” in shaping the MHPSS’s direction: pushing for a robust agenda, defining what needs to be included in the certificate, and ensuring that the design remains grounded in field needs rather than abstract academic priorities.?
She has led the needs assessment process together with Fernanda, engaging with international organizations, local partners in Jordan, and refugee learners to build an evidence-based foundation for the curriculum.
As co-chair of the Global Minds programme at the Department of Psychology, Professor Seibt is also instrumental in linking the GUA initiative to a wider ecosystem of research, teaching, and international collaboration on mobility, diversity, and inclusion.
Her leadership is repeatedly highlighted by colleagues as crucial to moving the project from concept to a concrete, draft curriculum that reflects both academic rigor and a human-rights-based, localized approach to mental health and psychosocial support.
Dr. Gulnaz Anjum, Senior Researcher, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo
Co-chair, Solidarity Hub – Co- Lead for the MHPSS certificate
Originally from Pakistan and having migrated to Canada, and now living and working in Norway, Dr. Anjum brings a deeply personal understanding of migration, privilege, and structural barriers. Her own trajectory—from a Global South country to a Fulbright scholarship in the US, then in Germany—has made the transformative power of education tangible in her life.
With a PhD in psychology and experience across Global South and Global North institutions, she is acutely aware of both the opportunities and the colonial and post-colonial structures embedded in higher education.?
Sitting in a Northern university as a scholar from the Global South, she describes her role as both a privilege and a responsibility: to challenge existing power structures, to “give back,” and to ensure that educational initiatives are not reproducing the same exclusions that displaced populations already face.
At the University of Oslo, she joined the Department of Psychology in 2022. Shortly after, in response to the war in Ukraine, she co-initiated a Ukraine-Initiative that grew into today’s Solidarity Hub. What started as lectures, webinars and helper-support for Ukraine has evolved into a rapidly expanding platform delivering research and trainings on topics such as gender-based violence in Colombia and Pakistan. As co-chair of the Solidarity Hub and a core member of the GUA team, she is centrally involved in designing the MHPSS certification and steering its focus on mental health and psychosocial support for displaced populations.
– For me, the GUA project is “not just a job,” but a continuation of my own lived experience: proof that high-quality, internationally recognized education can change the course of a life—and that such opportunities must be made accessible to refugees and other displaced communities, underlines Dr. Anjum.
Fernanda Rodrigues Costa, Global Minds Erasmus Mundus Student
Intern, researcher and co-designer in the GUA MHPSS pilot
Fernanda is originally from Goiás, in central Brazil, and is currently completing her final semester in the Erasmus Mundus Global Minds master’s programme in “Psychology of Global Mobility, Diversity and Inclusion in Society.” At the University of Oslo, she follows the immigration and inclusion pathway and is part of the highly competitive Global Minds cohort, where only a small number of students are selected from over a thousand applicants.
Her academic foundation is interdisciplinary: she holds a first bachelor’s degree in Political Science/ International Relations from the University of Brasília, where she was introduced to refugee struggles, international law, human rights, and international protection. A subsequent specialization in human rights coincided with a period of political backlash in Brazil, which made it increasingly difficult to pursue human-rights-based work within traditional political science.
This context led her to a second bachelor’s degree in Clinical Psychology, with a specialization in mental health and psychosocial support for Latin American migrants.?
Across both disciplines, one thread remained constant: the conviction that science is a tool for social change.
– Education as a pathway to transformation is also rooted in my family history. My mother changed her own reality by going to university and later led a master’s project teaching digital literacy to women heading households in social housing communities. Observing this work—where vulnerability, housing policy, and empowerment met in a single intervention—shaped my understanding of how education and research can be directly mobilized to improve lives, recalls Fernanda.
Within GUA, Fernanda’s involvement began as a mandatory internship and voluntary research project, which evolved into a central role in the design of the MHPSS pilot. She co-led the needs assessment in Jordan together with Professor Beate Seibt, worked closely with Save the Children and other field partners, and contributed to translating expert input and beneficiary perspectives into a concrete certificate structure. For her, the project is unique because it combines top-down systems (policy, international collaboration, educational passports) with bottom-up, person-centred psychosocial support—and places education at the heart of social change.
A Wider Network of Co-Creators
While this core team at the University of Oslo plays a key role, the GUA pilot rests on a broad collaborative foundation:
- Solidarity Hub at UiO – the platform through which much of the mental health and psychosocial support work is anchored, connecting students, scholars, and international partners.
- Incoming scholars and partners – such as Dr. Munyi Shea from Yale University, who will co-develop modules as part of a grant-supported collaboration.
- Global academic partners – including InZone at the University of Geneva, the German Jordanian University, and Bard College, which contributes to building the linguistic competencies of refugee learners.
- Implementation partner in Jordan – Save the Children, which operates the community centers where learners access internet, computers, classes, tutors, and coaches, and coordinates the local delivery of the program.
- Expert board contributors – practitioners from organizations such as the Norwegian Refugee Council, the Red Cross, Terre des Hommes Global and Terre des Hommes Jordan, and professionals affiliated with global health organizations, many of whom contribute their time voluntarily to guide the certificate’s localization and relevance.
- Global coordination and recognition – with key roles played by GUA leadership, including figures like Svein St?len and Marianne Knarud, who drive partnership-building and grant acquisition, and UNESCO, which now supports the issuance of educational passports that formalize and validate the credits learners earn.
Together, this constellation of individuals and institutions ensures that the MHPSS certificate is not only academically sound, but also grounded in lived experience, local realities, and a shared commitment to education as a human-rights-based tool for social transformation.
A Humbling and Essential Responsibility
For university staff and management, the GUA–LINK collaboration offers a model of how interdisciplinary teams can work together to address complex global challenges.
?Participants describe the process as humbling, as it requires academics to “kill their darlings” and let go of content that does not directly serve the learner.
As the world faces increasing displacement, GUA represents the University of Oslo’s commitment to using its privileged position to provide hope and agency to those who need it most—and LINK’s role in this co-creation demonstrates how thoughtful learning design can transform not just courses, but lives.