Tomorrow is the open house day at Unibator and nothing like giving the heads-up on a project that was on our radar for a while – Whinker.

Whinker wants to provide affordable, high quality education programs and international exchange programs, to enable more people to secure fair paid jobs in emerging and developing countries.

They aim to “close the gap” between developing and developed countries by widening overall access to education. This will lead to an increase in potential prosperity for those people living in emerging and developing countries.

Fundamentally, access to up-to-date education and knowledge materials has to be open, easy and free. To achieve this, Whinker provides all its learning products through a free-of-charge license and focuses on specific regional needs, in the local language.

Why? Access to quality education is limited in many regions of the world. For example, there are financial, temporal, linguistic or local restrictions. As a result, many people, especially from emerging and developing countries, lack important information, knowledge and skills.

In developing countries, these constraints lead to a lack of knowledge, key skills and access to information amongst the broader population. Despite this, these skill sets are necessary for a prosperous future in an increasingly interconnected world. A possible solution for that is online courses and online study.

However, the existing solutions are not focused on the needs and demands of emerging developing countries, imposing a large access barrier for those who need it most. Many online courses are also protected by license and are not accessible or affordable for most people.
Consider that in 2035, as many as 2.7 billion students will be living in this world.
This makes the problem at hand, and the urgency of finding a solution, even more visible. Most of these people will not have affordable access to a quality education, creating limited prosperity and income opportunities.
How? They identify the special regional educational needs. Then they search worldwide for institutions and individuals who possess a high degree of knowledge in these specific areas and are willing to share their knowledge and skills with the world. Together they develop learning materials, courses, programs and projects, which are then made available on their learning platform.
They are convinced of the importance of “open education”. They will establish a library for the different e-learning materials e.g. Online Courses, MOOC’s, Handbooks and scientific papers. These learning materials will be accessible free of charge through their website.
Students can furthermore access the Whinker program. This is a set of online courses and immersion programs, designed to give access to practical work, internship opportunities and “Boot Camps” both at home and in foreign countries. If you want to support them, vote for the Hessen Ideen nomination:

https://www.hessen-ideen.de/wettbewerb/ideen/ideen-2018/detail/eintrag/whinker-1/