Our pilot semester and new students in July
Dear friends, donors and supporters,
within our pilot semester we accepted 1.250 students in October 2015 and were able to close partnerships with 19 partner universities until today. Among them are RWTH Aachen, FH Lübeck, BAU Berlin, HNE Eberswalde, TH Wildau, Universität Kassel, Macromedia Berlin, SciencePo Paris. Currently we are in discussion with over 120 more universities and looking forward to welcome them soon in our programme. Our students are currently based in more than ten different countries.
New students
During July 2016 we have been working on accepting new students, who got access to our learning platform Kiron Campus a few days ago. At the moment most of them are still doing their first test courses, but as soon as we know more details about our new students we will have an update for you as well.
How the first semester went
The first semester has brought a lot of learnings with it already. We realized that we had a good start with our offerings, but need to start additional services in order to match the needs of our students even more. A full online degree program requires a lot of discipline and especially after arriving in a new country: a lot is demanded of refugees from paperwork to learning a new language and getting familiar with the culture of the hosting country. This is the reason why we want to strengthen our offline services in terms of quality and availability for them, in order to make their online study experience easier and more convenient.These additional services cover a buddy programme, a career service and counselling. They were started in Germany and the feedback is very positive. From now on, we are working on both improving those services and increase their availability in cooperation with our regional and international groups.
Study Hubs
Since some students are still missing full access to hardware and internet, one of our key focus areas is the set up of study hubs, which are local physical spaces with infrastructure and easy access at multiple locations. These hubs are important in order to connect students within the same area to improve exchange and build study communities.
Over the last few months we were able set up hubs in Berlin, Aachen, Cologne, Lueneburg, Lörrach and Paris. More cities are to follow!
