As migrants pour in, Germany launches online university for them - Esme Nicholson, WBEZ

A new university in Berlin is exclusively geared to refugees. Kiron University relies on existing online courses and aims to be tuition-free and accessible to asylum seekers worldwide. Markus Kressler pulls up a virtual seminar on mechanical engineering, from the Georgia Institute of Technology, on his laptop. The 25-year-old is a co-founder of Kiron University, a Berlin-based program for refugees that taps into open-source online lectures from other universities. Kiron University students take courses online for the first two years, working toward a bachelor's degree while they apply for asylum and acquire the paperwork and qualifications needed to enter a partner university, local to where they are, to complete the degree. "Basically, everyone can already log into these courses," Kressler says. "What we do is we just take these courses, bundle them into degree programs and make cooperation with real universities so that they also recognize these courses in order to really get a degree in the end." http://www.wbez.org/news/migrants-pour-germany-launches-online-university-them-113386