Respect Refugiados Presents Online Soft Skill Training
RESPECT Refugiados, the European branch of RESPECT International, located in Barcelona, started as a non-governmental organization (NGO) in June 2005 to help spread awareness of refugee issues.
Since its inception, it has been providing support for local NGOs to improve their competences and knowledge. They have a lot experience in online training, so they decided to put together the training Soft Skills and Management Abilities in NGOs for volunteers from developing countries.
They have already trained more than 100 volunteers and aid workers since it was announced in August on the RESPECT e-Zine.
Dieudonné Mutambala, who is a researcher and practitioner in education, human rights and conflict transformation, is one of the trainees. For his involvement in RESPECT activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) from 2004 to 2006, he won the United Nations Online Volunteer Award in 2006.
David Gonzalez was Dieudonné’s trainer who helped him to better understand the course material and also to integrate his field of experience into the course.
Dieudonné felt Team Building, Effective Meeting and Communication were the most helpful topics for him. He performed well and successfully completed the course despite being under immense stress since May 2007 because of threats against his life and that of his family due to his human rights work.
David thinks Dieudonné has been one of the most active persons in all the online discussions. He can be a key motivator for other students when they see what he thinks about the different topics and tries to put those in practice using his own experience as well as his passion to learn.
David and his colleagues created the course materials writing one big section on each skill they felt important like project management, people management, negotiation techniques, conflict resolution, self-organization, etc.
Then they created an online training platform and started giving access to students where they can download the course material (including exercises and the exam paper).
There is flexibility concerning the rhythm of exploring the course and contacting the teacher via email. They can also discuss with others, ask the professors questions and edit their inputs at any convenient time.
According to David, the best aspect of the course is that it gives a very good introduction to all of the soft skills at once, allowing people to start developing those competences by working on their communities.
David says they are always thinking about new training courses but it takes many months to finally create one and put it online. But they hope to make more training courses available for free to everyone.
Also many of the students ask to go more in depth in certain topics. So they are considering creating specific courses on particular topics. They include a short evaluation with each course and are happy to see everyone likes the training in general.
David would like to thank all students that keep spreading the word about the course and keep sending feedback about it, which is a great tool to help them improve the materials.
Dieudonné has already recommended the course to others. He suggests that the online course would help many other volunteers working with local non-profit associations in the Great Lakes Region of Africa, if Refugiados could start its French version as English is still a nightmare for people there.