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Executive Briefings

Published June 2009

Power to the People

  

  Mike Prokopeak

Education is key to success in today’s wired world, and thanks to Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef, getting access to higher education will soon be a whole lot easier — and cheaper.

Typically, college education is available to those who have the resources to enroll, leaving millions of people around the world locked out of many educational opportunities.

“I’m not the only one who feels that it doesn’t make sense,” Reshef said. “Quite a few people in the world feel that it’s a shame that people cannot afford education and do not get education because they cannot afford it.”

That inequity led Reshef to launch University of the People in January; it is the world’s first tuition-free online university. The university began accepting applicants in April and, as of May, had more than 650 applicants from 90 countries. Reshef said the university plans to enroll 300 students in September, add another 400 in January, another 550 in May 2010 and grow enrollment by approximately 30 percent every semester.

“The idea is to never stop,” Reshef said. “As long as there is demand, we will be there.”

If all goes according to plan, enrollment will nearly double every year and the university will have 15,000 students in four years.

Reshef, a 20-year veteran of for-profit education, was formerly owner and chairman of Kidum Group, an Israeli for-profit educational service company that was sold to Kaplan in 2005. While at Kidum, he was involved in building KIT, the first online university outside the United States, created in partnership with the University of Liverpool.

Unlike those initiatives, University of the People will operate as a nonprofit institution,utilizing open source technology to provide access to open courseware. The only charges will be a $15-50 entrance fee and $10-100 examination fees. People from poorer countries will get the lower price point, and those from wealthier countries will pay more.

“When we have 15,000 students, this amount will make the university sustainable,” Reshef said. “We need $6 million in order to get there, but when we have 15,000 students, that should make the university sustainable.”

While Reshef has been working on the idea for several years, he drew inspiration to see it to fruition in 2008, when he invested in and became chairman of the company that runs the online peer-to-peer study community, Cramster.com. Reshef decided to take the social networking model used by Cramster and others and apply it to academia — and do it for free.

“Peer-to-peer teaching is a phenomenon that can really help people study and, in a way, replace the traditional role of the teacher,” Reshef said.

It’s part of a growing trend in education to provide open access to educational resources online and encourage greater collaboration among students and teachers. Groups such as the OpenCourseWare Consortium and OER Commons have sprung up in recent years, providing free access to educational resources on the Web. (For more on the open courseware trend, read this Chief Learning Officer story.)