Internet connection saves integration and professional language courses

Online integration and professional language courses are now open to all participants – Pedagogical Director Tanja Fichtner and IT Administrator Stefan Eichenseher are also delighted. Image: zrb Weiden / Barbara Nickl.

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The Center for Regional Education (ZRB) at the Weiden-Neustadt Adult Education Center has been offering integration and professional language courses for years. Due to the lockdown, the ZRB had to send a total of eight language courses with around 150 participants to the “virtual classroom” in December. As a result, many interested parties could not have participated because they did not have an Internet connection.

This would have hit two of these courses particularly hard because they were already affected by the first lockdown in spring and now the much-awaited and needed DTZ exam would have been in danger again. In the past few months, those responsible had prepared the participants intensively for online learning, obtained technical equipment and made them available on loan. The participants, too, did everything they could to get on with the Online learning to prepare, as announced by the district office.

Help for hardship cases

In some households, however, there was no internet connection and not financially viable. The ZRB has therefore provided suitable LTE routers and a prepaid contract for the duration of the online learning free of charge for these hardship cases. Specifically, these are costs of just under 35 euros per household in order to save these people from taking part in the integration or professional language course.

These costs are expected to be incurred for a maximum of four months until the courses can take the exam. Since a financing gap of 579 euros could not be covered after the deduction of donations received, the district administrator Andreas Meier determined to take this amount from county funds.

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