My name is Conny, I have been to a few of your workshops and learning meetups a couple of years ago and now I am in charge of the Computer Science program at Kiron Open Higher Education, a MOOC-based learning platform for refugees (worldwide, but we’re based in Berlin).
Since our biggest student community is Berlin and since we obviously have some overlaps regarding topics, I wanted to get in touch and see how we can collaborate in order to help our students be successful in their learning, but also in general to bring together our efforts to help refugees get started with coding and learning.
Anyway, we have a “study weekend” coming up, where about 15-20 of our students from all over Germany will be coming to Berlin for an intensive coding weekend with workshops on Friday and Saturday 8./9. December. We are still looking for coaches for sessions on
Github,
HTML,
JavaScript,
Python and
a Crypto Party.
I thought some of you might be interested in helping us out with those workshops and take this as an opportunity to get to know each other a little better as organizations.
That is a great idea! I’d suggest you start a new thread here with the details of the study weekend and what you expect from coaches, how many you are hoping for etc and we promote the link within our network asking for interested coaches to comment in the thread to sign up and organize stuff further.
Apart from that: Are you aware of the regular (weekly and bi-weekly) Co-Learning events we currently do (Web Frontend JS/CSS/HTML, Python, Ruby, Rust, Go): https://www.meetup.com/opentechschool-berlin/ ? You and your students are welcome to join any time with whatever they’re working on and get some support.
I started this little question because I’m new to this Forum and didn’t want to intrude. But if you think making a specific thread for this is a good idea, I’ll definitely do that now.
Regarding further cooperation and Co-Learning meetings: I actually attended the Python meetups myself a couple of years ago and I love your format! This is definitely something our students would enjoy and I have promoted the Berlin ones I know to our students already in the past. However, since Kiron is an online platform, we only have a few students here in Berlin. The rest is spread out over Germany and the rest of the world. This study weekend is actually a one-time opportunity for a small group of them to come together and actually sit down in a group to learn and code. (We plan to repeat it, if it goes well, but maximum twice a year).
So, for now, I think the most beneficial would be for us to be able to access your network of coaches for events like the study weekend, and for you hopefully to access our widespread network of learners with strong ties in their local refugee communities. Additionally, we would love to incorporate some of your learning materials (e.g. on Web Development or Git) as additional resources into some of our modules. We could probably help out with some feedback or quality assurance measures if that’s something you’d be interested in?
Yes, yes, yes! All our material is licensed in a way that let’s you use it even for commercial reasons. We’re happy if you do and attribute us as author. And of course we’d LOVE feedback and other contributions! Easiest is to create issues and pull requests on Github. If there’s anything more general, feel free to post a thread in this forum, too.
