In mid-May 2022, we teamed up with Tetiana to apply for the DAAD’s “Ukraine digital: Ensuring academic success in times of crisis” funding program and kickstart an emergency project for her home institution, Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University (KSAEU). We had only a few weeks to put together a meaningful and doable project and get it coordinated with two university boards. Usually, something like this takes months, but everyone knew we had to act urgently. Thankfully, the International Center at Kiel University was super supportive, which helped us submit the application on time.
Fast forward to early July, and we got the green light from the DAAD! This meant we could kick off our project, offering support to keep education going strong at KSAEU‘s Faculty of Economics, even in the face of the ongoing war. The challenges were tremendous. Kherson was under Russian occupation and the university had relocated to Kropyvnytskyi city leaving lecture halls, laboratories, scientific materials, and technical equipment behind.
All teaching had fully switched to digital forms of distance learning. Teachers could see students only through the monitor screen, not having the opportunity to meet them in lecture halls. Even basic equipment for digital teaching and studying like notebooks were scarce. And many students were facing financial difficulties because many other financing sources had ran dry and their families could no longer support them as they used to. This is where our project tried to make a difference.
This was our plan: From our Kiel base, the Institute for Statistics and Econometrics, we wanted to send 70 laptops to KSAEU to support online teaching. We also announced a call for 66 online scholarships for students of KSAEU to support their online studies in Ukraine. We invited five students to Kiel University allowing them to continue their KSAEU program at a safe place, take additional courses at Kiel University and learn the German language. Finally, we supported online teaching at KSAEU in various ways and funded some courses needed in the BA programs Public Administration and Management.
So, we had a lot of work ahead of us, but we were excited that we could finally start our collaboration.
