Feb 25, 2017 09:29 AM EST By Emily Marks, UniversityHerald Reporter

The University of East London will be launching a free course for refugees and asylum seekers. This is part of the school's efforts to help immigrants get a fresh start.

The new short course is named the Open Learning Initiative (OLIve), The Independent reported. It will seek to give refugees and asylum seekers the educational grounding to be able to move forward with a foundation course and eventually earn a full bachelor degree.

Students of the free course by the University of East London will be able to join seminars and workshops in higher education. The areas that will be the focus of the course will be reading and writing in the English language for academic purposes, computer skills and issues surrounding social sciences, migration and globalization.

The first class of the course will have a capacity of 40 people. It will be held every Saturday from April this year.

The University of East London will be launching another program, which will take up 10 months, this September. It will provide the next stage for the refugees' educational pathway.

The OLIve course is part of a joint initiative between UEL, the University of Vienna, the Central European University in Hungary and the European Network Against Racism (ENAR). It is funded by a 440,000 Euro grant from the European Union's Erasmus+ program.

The three universities will be launching the same access courses. They are also in the process of improving guidelines for best practice with guidance from ENAR.

In 2015, a professor launched a similar project with the focus on life stories to the refugee camp in Calais Jungle, Times Higher Education reported. It was led by Corinne Squire, a professor of social sciences and co-director of the Center for Narrative Research at UEL.

Students were able to learn about reading, writing, art, poetry and photography. Professors of the course include a college lecturer from Ethiopa, a pharmacist from Syria, English literature and electrical engineering graduates from Sudan as well as a veterinary science student from Eritrea.

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