CIC - Collective Impact Campus

In response to global lockdowns, the need for digital alternatives to traditional education is higher than ever before. Whilst institutions worldwide have successfully adapted to online teaching, millions of refugees remain shut out. At the same time, third sector organizations that support people in conflict and crisis struggle to uphold their operations because they lack resources and know-how to digitalize their educational content. By opening up Kiron’s digital learning platform, we strive to collectively provide the largest repository of digital learning programs for refugees and underserved communities,  equipping users with digital literacy and job-market relevant skills. We help like-minded NGOs to digitalize and offer their programs on Kiron’s digital learning platform, which is optimized for usage in low-bandwidth areas and mobile-first. Through this, refugees can access a variety of high-quality courses, learn new skills and find meaningful employment.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused a shift from traditional education to digital solutions. Schools and universities worldwide have quickly pivoted, adopting online teaching methods This digital transformation has exacerbated the inequalities that refugees and underserved communities worldwide face with regards to access to education. 

Similarly, the pandemic has affected third sector organizations that support refugees and underserved communities that live in precarious situations. The need for finding alternatives to on-the-ground work has posed enormous challenges. Switching to online and implementing new technologies requires know-how and investment that many cannot commit to, given the resource-low environment that these organizations operate in. Consequently, underserved communities' access to education is becoming scarce, as many organisations are forced to stop their invaluable work. 

However, access to education in the fields of 21st century skills and digital literacy is of tremendous importance for these populations. In today’s fast-paced, digital world, everyday tasks such as finding resources, evaluating and communicating information, happen online. Often, refugees and underserved communities don’t own computers and have not learnt to use them, which is setting them back when searching for and finding employment, and eventually also affects their ability to integrate into new communities (International Society for Technology in Education, 2018).

Through our Collective Impact Campus (CIC) initiative, we invite nonprofits in the refugee education sector to join our online learning platform. Like-minded organizations will be assisted to digitalize their content with access to tools to produce high-quality materials and be able to digitally engage with their learners. On the platform, organizations have their own personalized branded space, including comprehensive backend features to navigate easily, and gain access to a learner analytics dashboard. Students can make use of all courses available on the global CIC curriculum. The Kiron Campus web application and Android mobile app are based on a modern scalable technology stack and a wide range of open source libraries. The platform is accessible even on old devices and courses can be downloaded, allowing students to study even in areas with poor Internet connection.  

By facilitating strategic collaboration, sharing of best practice and resources, we aim to strengthen the civil society sector, making it more resilient in the face of today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. Through this, more refugees and underserved communities globally receive access to high-quality digital learning opportunities - inclusive and without barriers - equipping them with employable skills in the fields of digital literacy and 21st century skills.

Through the Collective Impact Campus initiative, Kiron aims to support refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced people as well as members of the underserved communities in refugee host countries. The platform is currently open for users who are aged 18+, but we are in the process of implementing technical as well as non-technical safeguarding measures that would make the platform suitable for safe use of students that are 15 years. 

Our learning platform is open to students worldwide. As we developed Kiron Campus in response to the Syrian refugee crisis, a large proportion of the course material is available in English, Arabic and German, but more content is becoming available in Turkish and Spanish. As a next step, we plan to translate both the platform and course content into Farsi and French to better support displaced people from and in Afghanistan as well as French-speaking refugees in Africa.

What most of these refugees have in common is that they face barriers to accessing traditional forms of education in most host countries such as language barriers, lack of degree recognition, administrative difficulties, and lack of financial resources. As a result, many of them lack the skills required to succeed in the fast-evolving job market of the 21st century.  

Co-creation and student-centredness have been at the core of our platform and project development work since the very early days of Kiron. Students feedback and input has played a crucial role in defining the Kiron Campus curriculum and many platform features, such as the community space. The design and implementation strategy for the CIC initiative has been and continues to be developed based on the data we gather systematically from the nonprofit organisations we speak to collect their and their students' needs and vision for CIC membership. 

Jointly, with our CIC partners, we will help refugees and underserved communities to: 

1.  Gain skills and recognition needed to succeed in education and employment.

2. Access jobs, higher education or succeed with their own business idea. 

3. Feel prepared for a self-determined life and know how and where to find support.

4. Embrace life-long learning and know how they can enhance their skill set. 

5. Feel supported and recognise how they can support others. 

Our vision is a world where everyone can fulfill their highest potential and live a self-determined, dignified life so that together we can shape a sustainable future.

The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that global challenges require global solutions. By joining forces with like-minded NGOs and collectively building a digital repository of job-relevant courses, we strive to make quality education for refugees more accessible, inclusive and disruption-proof. On the one hand, we react to the fact that underserved communities need more tailored educational opportunities to hone their digital literacy and 21stCentury skills to succeed in today’s digitalized economy. On the other hand, CIC strives to be a network of impact-driven organizations united with a common goal, jointly reacting to global developments by working together and exchanging best practices.

The CIC was launched in March 2021 and is in pilot stage of development. The base of the CIC initiative is the digital learning platform that Kiron has developed and continuously improved  for the past six years. Reacting to the global need of digitalizing contents, we invite other nonprofit organisations to join and offer their learning materials on our platform. At the current stage, we set up the groundwork, and are ready to onboard partners. The dedicated CIC team is in conversations with potential partner organizations globally, with two partners presently being onboarded, prepared to digitalize and run their programs on the platform.

After five years of developing the Kiron Campus, continuously enhancing the technical infrastructure and having gained a thorough understanding of what our learners need, the COVID-19 pandemic has served as a catalyst to realize the long-held idea of opening up our learning platform to other organizations. The underlying vision is to increase impact by partnering up with other NGOs in the refugee education sector, complementing each other’s services and educational resources, sharing expertise and knowledge, and thus being able to serve more refugees and underserved communities worldwide with digital learning opportunities.

While there are many platform providers offering learning management systems and services to digitalize contents, the CIC attaches greatest importance and emphasis on the benefits of the “collective” aspect, cherishing the connection between CIC partners. This constitutes a value proposition for participating CIC organizations and students alike.  Students, on the one hand, benefit from the extensive portfolio of courses and modules to choose from and additional events and support services. Partnering organisations, on the other hand, gain expertise in the process of digitalizing contents, including access to additional tools that enhance educational resources didactically. In the future, we plan to incorporate our networks of university and industry partners, hosting events for students, exchanging best practices, facilitating further connections and exit opportunities for our students. Through this, we also hope to increase our advocacy for the needs of the vulnerable groups that we aim to support via this endeavour.

Prior to launching the CIC in March, we have been serving more than 14,500 students from 75 countries on Kiron Campus. By the end of the year, we aim to recruit a total of seven member organisations and anticipate that we will collectively support 25,000 students. The exact number depends largely on the organisations we partner with, their contents and their student numbers. One of the benefits of the CIC approach is that it scales in proportion to the scope and capacity of the organisations who join us. By the end of 2022, we aim to have a membership base of 20 - 25 organisations and expect to serve between 30,000 and 60,000 people. Assuming that 10 - 20 new member organisations join the CIC initiative every year, we project that over a duration of five years we actively serve a minimum number of 200,000 people but hope to reach 500,000 and more. The numbers include only people actively involved in educational programs delivered by Kiron and CIC members during that time. However, CIC students have life-long access to the platform and can use all resources of the global curriculum regardless of their status of enrolment in any particular program By the end of 2026, we hope to reach a minimum of one million people who can use the Collective Impact Campus to enhance their skills and get help when they need to.

Developing a robust framework for measuring and evaluating collective impact is an important aspect of the work we will deliver during the piloting phase of the CIC initiative. We have developed a new Theory of change that captures how we achieve outcomes, on student and partner level, to achieve our contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals 4 and 8. We have identified the below indicators as relevant to achieving our objectives:

Student-level outcome indicators: 

# of new students registrations 

# of active students on the platform

# of students awarded an official certification for completed courses

# of learners transitioning to landing opportunities

# of learners who benefit from content and support by multiple CIC partners

Learner satisfaction levels regarding their learning experience

# of students that feel empowered 

# who students confirming they have improved 21st-century skills 

Partner-level outcome indicators: 

# of partners who achieve their target attendance and retention rates for their online programs

# of partners who find it easier to reach learners after joining the CIC than in previous years

# of partners who report that thanks to CIC membership they can offer additional services to their learners.

# of partners who a) expand their geographical reach and/or b) their learner numbers and/or c) their target groups as a result of CIC membership

# of courses created by CIC partners independently using KC tools

Output indicators: 

# of synchronous learning opportunities offered on CIC

# of self-paced courses offered on CIC

Percentage of course completion rate (in comparison to international benchmark)

Currently the CIC team consists of 2 full time employees and 5 part time employees which are employed by Kiron. Furthermore some of Kirons engineers occasionally work for the CIC team when creating new features on the platform.

Since its inception in 2015, Kiron has emerged as an expert in digital higher education in Germany and increasingly so in Jordan and Lebanon. Kiron's team of 51 paid staff, interns and volunteers is made up of individuals from a variety of fields, whose sector-specific knowledge converges to develop the unique model of Kiron. Apart from project and partnerships management, operations and finance teams, Kiron has developed a sizable EdTech department to build and continuously optimize our platform, the Kiron Campus. Additionally, since the beginning of the year, we have an additional CIC team, dedicated to outreach activities and partner calls, onboarding and coordinating between CIC partners, EdTech and the partnerships and Fundraising team. 

To address the complexity of online learning and meet the needs of its students and CIC partners, Kiron applies agile methods among all of its operations and processes. By using an iterative, student-value driven approach, Kiron agile teams are capable of self-managing and improving their processes. Cross-functional teamwork allows for combining the various skill sets and ultimately fosters innovation and productivity. All our team members are experts in their respective fields, making Kiron a highly diverse and dynamic working environment. All teams work cross-nationally between Germany, Jordan and Lebanon.

Kiron, as an organization and employer, is strongly committed to embracing a respectful, tolerant and inclusive community of individuals. Since inclusivity is inherent to our mission of providing inclusive, digital learning opportunities to a very diverse and vulnerable target population, we put strong emphasis on fostering sensitivity for DEI topics among Kiron staff. A dedicated DEI team has been established to meet regularly and discuss how we, organization-wide, can confront equity in a way that nobody is discriminated against on the basis of race, color, gender identity, disability, sexual orientation, religion, age or ancestry.

Part of our measures to building a diverse, equitable and inclusive leadership team are reflected in a set of Kiron Values that, initiated by our People team, the whole organization jointly defined and elaborated on. The seven Kiron values consist of: Student-centeredness, Commitment, Creativity, Respect, Social responsibility, Continuous learning, Organizational Health. These values are part of Kiron’s identity and reflect the way we aim to work with each other towards our common vision. As part of our value Student centredness we commit to always incorporating the diverse perspectives and backgrounds of our student community and include them in design and development of product and projects. Additionally, DEI is considered in all hiring processes and the HR team and management board hold regular workshops on how to increase diversity in hiring. In the future, we plan to develop a more thorough statement on DEI at Kiron to share it with students, CIC partner and on our website.

Our solution is well aligned with the MIT Digital Inclusion challenge as we provide access to digital learning opportunities and 21st Century skills for refugees and underserved communities. Together, we can support our learners towards making the transition from “refugee” to “student”, “entrepreneur” or “leader”, and empower them to live up to their potential. Additionally, our solution fosters connection and working together with other NGOs in the refugee education sector to maximize impact. 

The Collective Impact Campus is an initiative that was launched in March. Especially now in this beginning phase, we rely heavily on outreach activities and often multiple partner calls to initiate meaningful partnerships. The MIT Solve network is of great value for us as a relatively small EdTech NGO since it connects tech-based social entrepreneurs around the globe. Being part of the class of peers and receiving mentorship and strategic advice going further would be highly beneficial, especially in these relatively early days. Since “collectivity” is the essence of our solution, we would be thrilled to work with impact-driven leaders across industries and sectors and exchange best practices. Additionally, being part of the finalists would give our initiative great exposure and serve as a catalyst for us to find more like-minded partner organisations that are ready to collectively revolutionize the higher education sector for refugees and underserved communities, worldwide.

As described above, at this point in time, we are in the midst of establishing CIC as a viable solution for refugee students and NGOs in the refugee education sector alike. This requires extensive outreach, networking and partnership building work, which is difficult to stem for the relatively small NGO that we are. Increasing our exposure through advice and mentorship in the field of Public Relations via MIT Solve would be highly beneficial and, potentially, raise awareness about our initiative and encourage new connections with interested NGOs. In fact, one of our first CIC partners became aware of our organisation because we were shortlisted on MIT Solve’s website for last year’s workforce challenge. 

Additionally, we would also require support setting up a good Monitoring & Evaluation Strategy. The last decade has seen an increasing demand from funders of nonprofit organisations to provide evidence of impact. Such impact evidence is often required to show a clear attribution of the change seen to the specific intervention by the nonprofit. We need to create a robust framework that allows us to provide a theoretical basis for measuring collective impact as well as the tools to do so effectively and efficiently. This is important to ensure that we can continuously learn and improve our approach. However, more importantly, it is crucial for the overall success of the initiative. Only if we succeed in providing both our CIC member organisations and their funders with evidence that their work contributes in a meaningful way to the outcomes achieved by the collective of organisations, will we be able to prevent organisations from working in silos.

We are keen on partnering with a number of actors and members of the MIT Solve network. MIT Open Learning, and more specifically ReACT, the MIT Refugee Action Hub, is of high interest. Like us, they see the enormous potential of technology to change the lives of refugees for the better. We would be very interested to exchange with them on their overall approach, their education-to-employment pathways and overall course portfolio, as well as student recruitment. They could assist us in maximizing effectiveness of our student support structures and tap into additional networks of refugee education organisations. 

In addition, MIT Solve partners such as General Motors, as well as several foundations such as the Atlassian Foundation or the Patrick J McGovern Foundation are already long planned contacts, since their support in the form of consultancy, providing mentoring to our students or introducing us to potential new CIC partners would be of high value for us.

CIC is qualified for this prize as our goal is to provide refugees and underserved communities worldwide with access to digital learning opportunities, equipping them with digital literacy and 21st Century skills. Through this, students increase their chances of finding employment and living a self-determined live.  Our vision is a world where everyone can fulfil their highest potential and live a self-determined and dignified life.

CIC is qualified for this prize as our goal is to provide refugees and underserved communities worldwide with access to digital learning opportunities, equipping them with digital literacy and 21st Century skills. Through this, students increase their chances of finding employment and living a self-determined live.  Our vision is a world where everyone can fulfil their highest potential and live a self-determined and dignified life.