ABSTRACT

Online education and in particular Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are often regarded as a way to solve global educational challenges. In this article, we highlight the students’ uptake of such a ‘digital solution’. Presenting initial findings from a research project in Germany, we situate our investigation in the specific context of digital educational offers for refugees, using Kiron Open Higher Education as an example. Kiron has designed an innovative academic model, with MOOCs at its core, to ease refugees’ access into higher education. Drawing from student data of 1375 Kiron students we look at students’ actual usage of the offer and the accompanying support services as well as the difficulties refugee students face while navigating online higher education. Results show, amongst others, rather low completion rates in the online courses and point to a much more nuanced picture of how students make use of the offer – putting online education as an easy, straightforward formula to the integration of disadvantaged students into question.

摘要

在线教育，尤其是大规模开放在线课程（MOOC）通常被视为解决全球教育挑战的一种方式。在本文中，我们重点介绍了学生对这种“数字解决方案”的接受程度。在介绍德国一项研究项目的初步结果后，我们以针对Kiron开放式高等教育的例子为基础，针对特定的数字化难民教育背景进行了调查。Kiron设计了一种创新的学术模式，以MOOC为核心，以减轻难民获得高等教育的机会。从1375名Kiron学生的学生数据中，我们可以查看学生对优惠的实际使用情况以及附带的支持服务，以及难民学生在浏览在线高等教育时面临的困难。结果显示，除其他外，