Online university helps keep educations on track
Yusran Shamiah, a Syrian who fled to Turkey, wants to finish her studies in accounting so she can help rebuild her home country.
“I wanted to do corporate governance, to stop corruption,” Shamiah, 30, said. She had planned to finish her degree in Syria and work in Damascus — but that goal was derailed by Syria’s 4-year-old civil war.
Hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into Europe from the Middle East, Asia and Africa put their lives in jeopardy and their educations on hold to make the perilous journey in search of safer and more prosperous futures. Many like Shamiah lack the funds or English language skills to restart their education.
One initiative to help is an online German university that began in October for about 1,000 refugee students across the globe. Kiron University, a tuition-free school based in Berlin, is exclusively for refugees awaiting official asylum status to remain in their host countries.
“People have to wait for a year to have an interview to begin the asylum process, which means that in this time they can’t even do a language course,” said Kiron co-founder Markus Kressler, a graduate student who runs the online university with 80 other volunteers. “This is where we stepped in. We saw a potential solution.”
Kiron relies on existing “mass open online courses,” or MOOCs, and works with eight academics from Harvard and MIT to create a two-year course of study.
“We have all seen our friends and classmates having their educational path derailed because of the war,” Shamiah said.
“There is an urgent need for action to help refugees who are at the start of their studies ... to immediately continue with their education. Kiron answers that need,” said Johannes Erdmann, an education professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. Not everyone is as convinced. “Online learning in the Middle East is not well-developed. So many refugees don’t have basic computer skills, while others might be able to use social media but they are used to a classic classroom structure,” explained Emma Bonar, education manager at the Norwegian Refugee Council who works with refugees in Jordan.
Kashif Kazmir, 21, a Kiron student who arrived in Germany in July after fleeing from Pakistan near the dangerous frontier with Afghanistan, said the school gave him a new start.
Kiron is specifically designed for people like Kazmir, according to Kressler.
“When you hear such stories, they are just so incomprehensible,” Kressler said. “I thought this would be a way to at least give these people some hope.”