Training

Since 2021, the Cultural Heritage Organization (CHO) has delivered more than 80 workshops, courses, seminars, and bi-lingual webinars focused on cultural heritage, digital heritage, creative cities, and grant writing.

Through these programs, we have reached over 5,700 participants worldwide, including more than 2,300 in-person participants and over 3,400 online participants from 34 countries. Our capacity building programs bring together students, researchers, professionals, and community members who share a commitment to protecting and reimagining cultural heritage in the digital age.

The Digital Heritage Internship Program (DHIP) is a pioneering initiative designed to train and empower local youth in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq through hands-on experience in digital heritage preservation and cultural innovation. The program provides intensive in-person and online training in project design, development, promotion, and fundraising for interdisciplinary digital heritage projects.

Led by CHO in collaboration with the Nahrein Network, DHIP brings together local and international trainers to deliver over 120 hours of instruction. Participants gain essential 21st-century skills, build professional networks, and develop AR and VR-based capstone projects in response to real needs identified by local stakeholders.

The program was developed and directed by Dr. Rozhen Kamal Mohammed-Amin, President of CHO, Associate Professor at the Kurdistan Institution for Strategic Studies and Scientific Research (KISSR), and Co-Director of the Nahrein Network. The initiative is supported by the Nahrein Network, a collaborative effort between University College London (UCL), the British Museum, CHO, and KISSR, with implementation support from Suli Innovation House (SIH) and the Culture Factory.

DHIP Program Stats (2023–2024): Duration — 10 months (September 9, 2023 – July 6, 2024); Trainers — 14 experts from 5 different countries; Training Hours — 120+ hours of structured sessions.

We began hosting online workshops and webinars during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and the initiative quickly proved to be highly successful. Real-time Kurdish interpretation expanded access, strengthened local relevance, and ensured inclusivity for our diverse audience.

We hosted 20 online workshops throughout 2020–2022 spanning the themes of Creative Cities and Digital Cultural Heritage, carried out by professionals from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, attracting around 1,000 attendees from around the world.

AR & VR Education Workshops — Instructor: Mark Billinghurst. The goal of this online workshop course was to introduce participants to AR/VR technology and provide them with the skills to create their own AR/VR experiences, using a combination of lectures and hands-on activities.

Professor Dr. Mark Billinghurst serves as the Director of the Empathic Computing Laboratory and holds professorships at both the University of South Australia in Adelaide and the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He earned his PhD from the University of Washington in 2002 and has authored more than 650 publications covering AR, VR, remote collaboration, and Empathic Computing. He was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2013 and received the ISMAR Career Impact Award in 2019. In 2022, he was inducted into both the ACM SIGCHI Academy and the IEEE VGTC VR Academy.

Duration: 6 sessions extended over a period of a month and a half. Total Training Hours: 14.