Kiron Open Higher Education is a social start-up which gives displaced people access to higher education worldwide, regardless of whether they are missing any papers, or whether they have not yet received their refugee status. The Kiron study model combines online and offline elements and is offered free of charge anywhere in the world. As an overall goal, Kiron aims to foster integration in the host country and creates long-term perspectives for displaced people. It enables them, through higher education, to integrate themselves both into the labor market, and into society and empower them to live a self-determined life. For this purpose, Kiron uses a mixture of online and offline education. It creates degree programs that consist of an average time of up to two years online and the rest of the study time spent at a partner university, attending regular classes and afterwards, receiving an accredited bachelor degree. The online studies are enabled through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). These courses originate from world-class universities like Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and MIT, and are accessible to our students through platforms such as edX, FutureLearn and Udacity. In collaboration with these providers, Kiron links suitable online courses to an innovative tailored-made learning platform and combines them with the latest e-learning technology in order to create study modules. As Kiron is online based, it is virtually everywhere. Everyone can enroll at Kiron - regardless of place and time. The enrollment process allows many students since Kiron has few capacity limits. That is why Kiron’s work can be done at a large scale. Furthermore, due to the amount of online courses offered, the students have access to course content in various languages.
