18 November 2020
King's Online course enabling refugees to continue their education selected for new Google Initiative
The King’s Online and King's Business School collaboration features in the Grow stronger with Google campaign.
One of King’s Online’s Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), which was developed so that refugees, displaced people and the communities supporting them in the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA) region can continue their studies, has been selected to be part of the Grow stronger with the Google initiative.
This new initiative from Google aims to accelerate economic recovery through technology, tools and training so that local businesses, communities and people can grow stronger, faster and more resilient.
The four-week course Entrepreneurship: From Business Idea to Action was designed by King’s Online in collaboration with King’s Business School and is delivered through the FutureLearn platform. The course looks at how to develop yourself as an entrepreneur, as well as how to build an enterprise from idea generation to action plan. Learners can also enhance their own entrepreneurial ideas, practice pitching and learn about developing their enterprise within an Entrepreneurship Ecosystem.
The course is one of the seven MOOCs created as part of the Partnership for Digital Learning and Increased Access (PADILEIA), which is led at King’s by Dr Tania Lima. PADILEIA aims to increase access to higher education and improve the career prospects of Syrian refugees and disadvantaged host-community students in Jordan and Lebanon through online and blended courses.
King’s Online plays a pivotal role in the design and development of these courses and learner-centred design is always the number one priority across all their projects. To develop Entrepreneurship: From Business Idea to Action, King’s Online engaged with facilitators, students in the region and academics within King’s to deliver content suited to the students’ current knowledge and interests.
Along with bespoke MOOCs, the PADILEIA project also works with regional partners to deliver eight-month foundation programmes.
So far, over 8,000 self-identifying refugees and disadvantaged young people have participated in one of these courses, and more than 400,000 learners have registered on these courses worldwide, suggesting that they are reaching significantly more beneficiaries.
Find out more about PADILEIA.
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King's College London has a long and proud history of serving the needs and aspirations of society. We are committed to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a university, and we use them as a framework for reporting on our social impact. The SDGs are a set of 17 goals approved by the 193 member states of the United Nations (UN) which aim to transform the world by 2030. This work supports SDGs 4, 10 and 17.