We, the Education and Competence Center e.V. – “BiKo” for short, are a non-profit association that promotes values such as respect for human dignity, cultural and intercultural openness, equal opportunities and equal rights for women and men.
With our language courses – literacy courses, integration courses, second language courses and orientation courses – we want to promote the active, cultural participation of our students in private and public life in Germany and give them the means through our course content to lead their lives here in Germany individually and self-determined.

Personal development, social integration and obtaining a professional qualification in our country are not possible without mastering the German language, and this is where BiKo comes in with its work, with its language courses. This is our self-imposed mission, which also follows a public educational mandate established by law.

BiKo sees itself as a place of education and qualification, as a place of learning, culture and communication. The broad access to education, culture and “learning competences”, through the learning of a language, is conveyed and made possible by us.

We see our competence in the task areas “imparting language skills”, “imparting information”, “imparting orientation”, “stimulating learning and curiosity”, “promoting intercultural understanding” and “promoting social learning”.
In addition to imparting knowledge, we accompany the individual learning process of our participants, advise them professionally and provide them with orientation.

Ourmost important resource is our staff and teachers, who have at their disposal as infrastructure not only classrooms and teaching materials (books, dictionaries, worksheets, etc.) but also media such as blackboards, computers and programs, televisions, CD players.

The core work at BiKo is the work around and in the language courses. The success of a course attendance is essentially based on “successful learning”, which we define (as an “ideal case”) as follows:

Successful organizational learning (BiKo)

Successful learning for us as an organization is,

• • When we have achieved an improvement in the learning process and an increase in the learning success of our learners,
  • as we move forward in our effort to optimize shared learning between participants (TN) and staff (MA).
  • if we achieve the creation of a pleasant environment for learning and working for all,
  • when the regular evaluation of our performance by the learners, but also by our MAs and ourselves, yields positive results.

The above-mentioned points are just as much a part of successful learning as the constant effort to align all of our processes and structures to support the learning and educational process of the learners and to make BiKo a constantly “learning organization” and to maintain it as such.

The “learning organization” also includes our networking and exchange with other integration course and education providers.

Our target group is primarily men and women who want to learn German in order to find their place in our society and in the working world of the Federal Republic of Germany. These are European and non-European migrants and asylum seekers who come to us on their own initiative, but also through mediation and at the request of the BAMF, the ABH and the JCs. Our learners can be eighteen, but they can also be eighty years old, because learning is a lifelong process that never ends.

Through our language courses, we want our students to learn German,

• • to be able to start a successful integration into our society,
  • to be able to participate in society, culture and the world of work in our country,
  • to gain insight into the functioning and structure of our society, and
  • to understand how they can access the world of work in our country.

The goal of our work is that our students / customers are satisfied students / customers. We can achieve this by remaining in constant, intensive and individual exchange with them.

We regularly inquire about the satisfaction of our customers and always try to take their wishes into account in our work within the scope of our possibilities.

We employ competent, open-minded and motivated employees and honorary staff in our administration as well as in our teaching department, who at the same time work and act in a team-oriented and self-reliant manner.

We see the diversity in personality, cultural background and origin of our employees as an enrichment for us, value it highly, and also see it as an important resource in pursuing our goals and fulfilling our tasks.

The know-how we have is based on the competence and quality of our staff and teachers. Maintaining and improving this is a constant concern for us.