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 our 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 21st century 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 and learn essential skills that are needed to enter today’s increasingly automated and digitalized labour market.

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 millions of refugees and underserved communities worldwide face with regards to accessing education. 

Similarly, the pandemic has affected third sector organizations that support refugees and underserved communities living 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, worldwide. Despite tremendous talent and incredible determination, refugees face numerous obstacles when accessing higher education: language barriers, lack of degree recognition, administrative difficulties and insufficient financial resources (UNHCR). Similarly, gaining access to the labour market is associated with additional burdens. Beyond higher education, a blend of both soft and hard skills is essential to find employment in today’s increasingly automated and digitized labour market. Many refugees often lag behind with respect to this due to educational gaps or lacking work experience. 

COVID-19 has exacerbated the inequalities that refugees face with respect to accessing equitable quality education. While online education is proving to be a viable alternative for more privileged communities, it only serves to widen the educational gap between those who can access it and those who cannot - studying online often requires high-speed internet, computers and an appropriate studying environment. Additionally, offline programs provided by the many nonprofits in the refugee education sector were forced to be stopped, leaving thousands of refugees in the dark. Kiron’s Collective Impact Campus strives to react to these drawbacks by offering students free educational resources that are accessible via low data Android App, operating smoothly in low-bandwidth areas, supporting old devices and browsers. Furthermore, by joining forces with like-minded nonprofits in the refugee education sector and supporting them to digitalize their contents, valuable educational programs are made available again. 

Currently, more than 14,000 students are active on Kiron Campus to pursue their educational goals. 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 plays 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 on students’ and CIC partners’ needs which we gather systematically in our internal backend. 

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

• Gain skills and recognition needed to succeed in education and employment.
• Access jobs, higher education or succeed with their own business idea. 
• Feel prepared for a self-determined life and know how and where to find support.
• Embrace life-long learning and know how they can enhance their skill set. 
• Feel supported and recognise how they can support others. 

Together with our CIC partners, we strive to reach a world where everyone can fulfill their highest potential and live a self-determined, dignified life.

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 digital literacy and 21st century skills to succeed in today’s digitalized economy. On the other hand, CIC strives to be a network of impact-driven organizations united with the common goal to jointly react to global developments by collaborating 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 learning contents, sharing expertise and knowledge, and thus being able to serve more refugees and underserved communities worldwide with job-market relevant digital learning opportunities. 

While there are many platform providers offering LMS and services to digitize 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 digitizing 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.

Organizations that join the CIC have the opportunity of creating their own educational program within their own personalized “Campus Space”, adopting the variety of integrated features and functionalities to maximize the quality of their digital programs.

The campus is cloud-hosted safely and runs smoothly to enable our partners to easily offer their e-learning or blended learning offer through our existing digital learning platform. In addition to being responsible for hosting, maintenance and performance, we also develop and enhance all features made available to our partners’ learners and ensure that the platform is easy to navigate, modern and adjusting to new learners’ needs. All frontend and backend services are made available to our partners. In our backend, partners can insert or create new content and produce courses, videos, texts, interactive HTML5 elements. Partners can download the content produced by them as files to be used through other modes as desired, as it is their intellectual property. 

The platform is reachable from any part of the world and optimized for low-bandwidth settings. It is built as progressive web that makes the learning experience faster and more reliable for all users, and is especially powerful in unstable network conditions. Kiron Campus is accessible via any standard web browser or via the Kiron Campus Android app, in multiple languages, including Arabic and Spanish.

Providing refugees with educational opportunities has a significant impact on their lives and on the communities and economies in which they live. In the field of tertiary education, online learning has become a viable alternative since it offers refugees and underserved communities, who often find themselves in unstable circumstances, a flexible alternative that they can commit to on a self-paced basis. The technical implementation of our CIC is based on Kiron’s six-year expertise in setting up and running a digital learning platform for refugees, the Kiron Campus. We are student-centric and continually analyze the way students use our platform and services. By gathering information within the Kiron Campus’s internal backend, we are able to make regular data-driven assessments of the success and impact of our model. Reacting to the need of increased accessibility even in low-bandwidth areas, we have optimized our platform for mobile-first use and built a low data Android App. Additionally, students can download content to continue studying even without internet connection. 

We can assess the effectiveness of our endeavours based on learner analytics, student surveys and feedback of students and partners. Prior to launching CIC in March 2021, 14,000 students have used the digital learning platform to improve their personal and professional skills. In comparison to 2019, the number of students has doubled, demonstrating the growing need for digital alternatives, especially in times of COVID-19 and global lockdowns. Moreover, when assessing learner analytics and user satisfaction, 85% of our students reported increased organisation, time management, and learning method skills, which are crucial in possible future studies and employment. Our completion rate is 10% higher than average, which is also reportedly based on Kiron’s high focus on student support mechanisms, such as the help desk and mentoring, and personalized guidance which we emphasize during all that we do. 

CIC, as an internet-based solution offering services to vulnerable populations, is associated with a number of risks and potential risks that have to be recognized and responded to. Refugees and underserved communities worldwide are particularly exposed and vulnerable to online abuse, given their lack of legal protection and often challenging personal circumstances. Risks we need to mitigate include mistreatment of personal data, harmful interactions between users and staff, as well as overall safeguarding. 

Our Safeguarding policy sets out the guiding principles Kiron staff and CIC partners are required to follow at all times. A dedicated Safeguarding Officer monitors and enforces adherence to the policy and delivers regular updates and training. Offering our services involves handling of personal data and results in associated risks. All our data handling processes follow EU GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) guidance and all staff undergo mandatory training before commencing their work at Kiron. Additionally, we have introduced a Data Privacy Policy and corresponding data sharing agreements with CIC partners that are based on the same regulation. 

The risks associated with online program delivery also apply to our CIC members. We require prospective partners to confirm that they comply with our guidelines, prior to signing CIC memberships. Since CIC partners might be new to interacting with their students in an online setting, we provide guidance and will emphasize the code of conduct, safeguarding and data security policies during onboarding and additional training. Breach of the ethical standards will lead to exclusion from the platform.

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.

Through CIC, we aim to scale, i.e. reach more refugees and members of disadvantaged groups and at the same time improve outcomes for the individual students who use our platform.  

We plan to scale by:

• Recruiting 20-30 new CIC member organisations each year, taking our membership base to 100-150 organisations after five years. 

• Helping member organisations digitalize and professionalize their service so that CIC members themselves can reach more people with better services. 

• Developing tools and resources to fully or partially automate onboarding and training processes (e.g. by creating courses on learning design best practice, providing course templates) 

• Developing a robust Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning framework to create a strong evidence base for collectively achieved outcomes and impact and improves CIC members ability to attract funding for their programs and services. 

We plan to improve individual outcomes by: 

• Creating a global network of organisations collaborating to provide complementary services and to improve outcomes for all refugees and disadvantaged learners using the platform; 

• Identifying and developing opportunities for joint projects among CIC members who offer complementary services that can be combined to create better services for learners, including collaborations with other partners to create pathways to landing opportunities (i.e. transfer to university, jobs, internships, self-employment);  

• Facilitating frequent opportunities for knowledge and best practice exchange between CIC members. 

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

% 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 values “Student centredness” and “commitment” we commit to always incorporating the diverse perspectives and backgrounds of our student community and include them in our design and development of the product and projects. Additionally, DEI is considered in all hiring processes and the HR team and management board team hold regular workshops on how to increase diversity in hiring.

Our solution is well aligned with the MIT Digital Workforce 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 access to digital learning opportunities for refugees and underserved communities, worldwide. Through this, more refugees and underserved communities will hone the skills needed to enter the job market.

Collective Impact Campus - Berlin 

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.

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.