How it started
Soon after the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences of Kiel University funded two short-term scholarships for Ukrainian scholars who had fled the war. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy kindly provided housing at their „Haus Weltclub“. At that time, Prof. Dr. Kai Carstensen served as the Faculty’s Dean and assumed responsible for administration and management of these scholarships.
Assoc. Prof. Tetiana Skibina, PhD in Economics, from Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University (KSAEU) became one of the scholarship holders. Following the Russian occupation of Kherson, she had to leave the city, and her University relocated to Kropyvnytskyi city. The situation at KSAEU was very difficult so Tetiana and Kai decided to apply for some funding at the German Academic Exchange Service to help. Fortunately, Dr. Anna Titova, head of the Interdisciplinary Center of Statistics at Kiel University, joined the team.
Phase 1: Emergency aid
Phase 1 of the project targeted the most pressing needs of Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University (KSAEU). After the invasion and the subsequent relocation to Kropyvnytskyi city, all teaching 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. The main laboratories, scientific materials, and technical equipment remained in Kherson, and even basic equipment for digital teaching and studying like notebooks were scarce. This is where our project tried to contribute.
From our Kiel base, the Institute for Statistics and Econometrics, we sent 70 laptops to KSAEU to support online teaching. Thereby, KSAEU could equip an auditorium in a protected place where digital work was possible in spite of the ongoing war. We funded 66 online scholarships for students of KSAEU to support their studies in those extremely difficult times in which many other financing sources ran dry. 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. They received scholarships to cover their travel, accommodation, and living expenses, and we assisted them in preparing the necessary documents and adapting to the new environment. Finally, we supported online teaching at KSAEU in various ways and funded some courses needed in the BA programs Public Administration and Management.
The German Academic Exchange Service generously supported this project phase as part of its initiative Ukraine digital: Ensuring academic success in times of crisis with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research from August to December 2022. Assoc. Prof. Victoria Krikunova, PhD in Economics, Dean of the Faculty of Economics at KSAEU served as local co-head in Ukraine.
Phase 2: Teaching cooperation
In autumn 2022, the Ukrainian army liberated Kherson. We took this as a signal that no matter how much hardship was yet to come, Ukraine’s future lies in a free and democratic Europe. To shape this joint future, Universities are excellent places. They have always been laboratories of progress where people and ideas meet. So why not bring Kiel‘s ideas to Kherson and Kherson’s ideas to Kiel?
Our vision is to create an international campus where students and teachers of our two Universities can work and learn together, exchange ideas and collaborate when they think about solutions for the challenges ahead. The second project phase is meant as a first step towards this end.
We introduced the fully digital Certificate in Quantitative Analysis for Business, Economics and Public Administration as a joint initiative which brings together the relative strengths of both partners. While the Faculty of Economics at KSAEU is strong in the fields of business administration, economics and public administration with a Ukraine-specific focus, Kiel’s Institute for Statistics and Econometrics (ISE) is specialized in empirical methods and their applications.
To earn the Certificate, students have to choose course pairs from a two-tier list of eligible courses. Tier one includes courses on substantive matter like State and Regional Management or State and Public Law provided by KSAEU lecturers. As a complement, tier two features ISE’s statistical and econometric methods courses. Students enrolled in the Certificate program need to choose courses from both tiers, combine and train this knowledge in additional seminars, and finally submit and defend an applied seminar paper.
We designed the Certificate is an incentive for students to simultaneously deal with substantive questions and methodological challenges in order to propose solutions backed by institutional knowledge, facts and data. This will become highly relevant when Ukraine starts to rebuild its infrastructure, reform its economy and integrate into the EU because then it will need young people who are trained to think, and act, in terms of evidence-based policies. KSAEU’s students will also benefit from being better prepared to take part in future exchange programs with Kiel University.
We went live with the Certificate program at KSAEU in autumn 2023. Both from the 30 enrolled students and the involved teachers, we obtained very positive feedback. Therefore, we plan to repeat the program – with some adjustments – at an annual frequency.
The German Academic Exchange Service again generously supported this project phase as part of its initiative Ukraine digital: Ensuring academic success in times of crisis with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research from January to December 2023. The Institute for Statistics and Econometrics, the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Science, and the International Center of Kiel University co-financed a considerable part. Therefore, we were able to award 30 scholarships per semester for students at KSAEU and two visiting scholarships to Kiel University.
Phase 3: Deepened teaching cooperation
Following the successful start of the Certificate program which is prepared by teachers from both partner Universities but offered only to students of KSAEU, we plan the joint course Applied Statistical Programming with R with students and teachers from Kiel and Kherson in the spring term 2024. We hope this becomes the nucleus of a truly international campus.
The course consists of a lecture and a seminar, that are open to BA students both from KSAEU and Kiel University. In the first half of the semester, we will teach the lecture as a hands-on introduction to the powerful statistical software R. Topics covered will be accessing data via API, organizing data, basic programming, visualization, basic statistical analysis, publication. In the second half of the semester, the students will implement an empirical project to apply the new knowledge as a kind of decision support system. A typical project will be as follows: Students develop an R script that automatically downloads and updates detailed inflation data from the statistical office, processes and stores them in a convenient format, presents inflation time series in appropriate graphics that visualize current trends and heterogeneities between product groups, analyzes the graphical findings with statistical tools such as correlations and regressions, and publishes the results. Students will also write a brief user manual of their script that help the reader to use it, and interpret as well as contextualize the results.
The topics will be prepared by lecturers from KSAEU and Kiel University in order to combine the strengths of both sides and develop interesting projects from different parts of economics, management, and public administration. Accordingly, each project will be assisted by a designated lecturer. In addition, we plan to offer regular meetings to monitor the project progress and support whenever needed. We envisage that students will work in mixed teams from both Universities and meet in Kiel for a joint workshop for 1-2 weeks in June to finalize, present, and discuss their projects in an international environment. Upon completion, students will be awarded a digital certificate.
To further strengthen the long-term sustainability of this project, we plan to organize an online summer school Applied Statistics and Econometrics open to all interested lecturers and researchers of KSAEU. It will deal with topics of descriptive and inductive statistics, visualization, regression analysis, and prediction, and introduce to didactical aspects of teaching statistics digitally. It will be hands-on using the statistical software R and discussing examples relevant for economics, management, and finance.
We are very grateful that the German Academic Exchange Service again generously supports this project phase as part of its initiative Ukraine digital: Ensuring academic success in times of crisis with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research from January to December 2024. The Institute for Statistics and Econometrics, the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Science, and the International Center of Kiel University co-finance a considerable part. Nevertheless, funding has become more difficult which is why we can only award 10 online scholarships per semester for students at KSAEU and one visiting scholarship to Kiel University.