[Open-education] Kiron University, Germany - free courses for refugees

[Paul Bacsich Sero]

(Thanks to Rory McGreal via the OER-Forum for this new story in our theme of online education for refugees.)

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Kiron, a new largely online university with a campus in Berlin and staffed by volunteers - https://kiron.university/ - plans to help refugees continue their education - for free. It claims to have partnered with more than 20 universities throughout the world in order to offer a free, three-year programme that will grant students an accredited degree.  All interested students have to do to qualify is provide proof they have refugee status or have applied for it. Kiron was founded in December 2014, by Markus Kressler and Vincent Zimmer.

The program’s first year will offer German and English classes as well as more general preparation courses. By the second year, students may take more specified classes in one of five areas of interest, including business, engineering and computer science. For their third year, they can transfer to a partner university to complete their degree – only at that point will students be required to present their legal documents and school certificates. (Refugees often don't have immediate access to these documents, which  are required for entry to most universities – though not to some open universities.) While the courses are currently offered only in English, Kiron hopes to later offer programs in both Arabic and French. 

In order to offset the cost of the classes, Kiron is crowdfunding scholarships for the refugees. The institution has already raised enough money to cover 138 scholarships, the website notes. 
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Commentary....
It could be argued that the above story is out of scope for our List since the courses are not open in the strict sense, though free at the point of use - but I took the view that the story was of sufficient relevance to previous ones featured that our audience would want to know about it, and maybe to discuss further possible variants of the model. 

German-speaking countries are often viewed (e.g. in POERUP and other overview reports) as late entrants into OER but in the wider area of MOOCs and online Kiron is only one of several developments. 

Perhaps one of our German readers can do a blog posting for us on either or both of these topics?

Paul


Paul Bacsich
Coordinator, Open Education Working Group - http://education.okfn.org/blog/
Senior Consultant, SeroHE


Audit trail.....
-----Original Message----- 
From: rory 
Sent: Thursday, October 08, 2015 7:59 PM 
To: Open Educational Resources - an online discussion forum 
Subject: [OER] Kiron University Free courses from Germany 

FYI

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/online-university-for-refugees_5612c9e7e4b0dd85030cdefa

Rory
-- 
Rory McGreal
UNESCO/COL/ICDE Chair in OER
Co-Editor IRRODL
Athabasca University
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