Back to blog
June 18, 2019

Our partner: HM Foundation

BLESS, a three-year collaboration between Kiron and the H&M Foundation, creates an innovative and supportive learning environment for students to achieve study success, facilitate efficient transfer processes, and implement scalable activities for students worldwide.
Partners
Christoph Buerglen
Fundraising & Comms

The Project

BLESS, a three-year collaboration between Kiron and the H&M Foundation creates an innovative and supportive learning environment for students to achieve study success, facilitate efficient transfer processes, and implement scalable activities for students worldwide. The project focuses on female students by offering additional support services including offline practical learning support, student community building and online study material.

Impact

As part of BLESS, we held six offline classes in Berlin and Munich where students could come together and learn. We also conducted our first-ever Women’s Week in April 2018 with a focus on refugee women and higher education. A roundtable with the topic “The future is female” connected women from the political, legal, academic, and digital sectors with our students and the wider community. BLESS was also crucial in expanding our online community and our digital campus through additional learning resources and technical support. Our extensive outreach and communications campaign allowed us to reach wide parts of the community in Berlin and beyond.

BLESS – Building a Learning Environment for Study Success

Kiron Open Higher Education is happy to announce a new partnership with the H&M Foundation: project BLESS (Building a Learning Environment for Study Success). The H&M Foundation is a non-profit global foundation, privately funded by the Stefan Persson family, founders and main owners of fashion company H&M. Through BLESS, Kiron and the H&M Foundation will create an innovative and supportive learning environment to achieve study success, facilitate efficient transfer processes, and implement sustainable scaling activities. The project started in fall 2017 and will run until September 2020.

Obtaining and interpreting student progress data is necessary for the design and personalization of Kiron’s learning platform and student support services. To better identify student needs and obstacles to learning, we will conduct surveys of 1,500 students. Based on our findings, innovative student learning resources will be created through the production and collection of Open Educational Resources available on Kiron Campus as well as open to the public. Moreover, we have implemented a central repository for integrating study progress data from disparate sources.