Kiron Open Higher Education (gUG)

Kiron Open Higher Education (gUG) is a non-profit social start-up, whose mission is to make higher education accessible to refugees around the world. Our goal is to empower people to integrate, not only on an economic level within the labour market, but also on a social level into society. Our students complete the first two years through online studies and then transfer to one of our partner universities, where they obtain an accredited university degree.

By virtue of this concept, refugees can start studying without immediate proof of legal documentation, do not have to pay tuition fees, benefit from an enrolment capacity that accommodates all interested students, have access to course content in various languages as well as language courses and can study independent of location.

The two years of online studies are mostly enabled through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) from world-class universities like Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley and MIT. We link suitable online courses to our learning platforms and combine them with the latest e-learning technology in order to create study modules. Our online study content currently boasts over 400 courses from four different departments: Business Administration, Engineering, Computer Science and Social Sciences. Our partner universities accredited these online courses according to previously agreed equivalence agreements, which are based on the Lisbon Recognition Convention.

To provide access to higher education for many refugees in Turkey, Kiron is forming partnerships with local universities and non-governmental organizations and will take in 1.000 students by the end of this year.