1st TUITION ONLINE FREE UNIVERSITY:University of the People

Discussion in 'General Distance Learning Discussions' started by AGS, May 22, 2009.

Loading...
  1. AGS

    AGS New Member

    http://www.uopeople.org/


    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/26/education/26university.html?_r=3&scp=1&sq=Shai%20Reshef&st=cse

    Israeli Entrepreneur Plans a Free Global University That Will Be Online Only
    Sign in to RecommendSign In to E-Mail or Save This Print ShareClose
    LinkedinDiggFacebookMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalinkBy TAMAR LEWIN
    Published: January 25, 2009
    An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People.

    Skip to next paragraph

    Shai Reshef

    Related
    University of the People Web Site
    “The idea is to take social networking and apply it to academia,” said the entrepreneur, Shai Reshef, founder of several Internet-based educational businesses.

    “The open-source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free,” Mr. Reshef said. “We know that online peer-to-peer teaching works. Putting it all together, we can make a free university for students all over the world, anyone who speaks English and has an Internet connection.”

    About four million students in the United States took at least one online course in 2007, according to a survey by the Sloan Consortium, a nonprofit group devoted to integrating online learning into mainstream higher education.

    Online learning is growing in many different contexts. Through the Open Courseware Consortium, started in 2001 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, universities around the world have posted materials for thousands of courses — as varied as Lambing and Sheep Management at Utah State and Relativistic Quantum Field Theory at M.I.T. — all free to the public. Many universities now post their lectures on iTunes.

    For-profit universities like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University have extensive online offerings. And increasingly, both public and private universities offer at least some classes online.

    Outside the United States, too, online learning is booming. Open University in Britain, for example, enrolls about 160,000 undergraduates in distance-learning courses.

    The University of the People, like other Internet-based universities, would have online study communities, weekly discussion topics, homework assignments and exams. But in lieu of tuition, students would pay only nominal fees for enrollment ($15 to $50) and exams ($10 to $100), with students from poorer countries paying the lower fees and those from richer countries paying the higher ones.

    Experts in online education say the idea raises many questions.

    “We’ve chatted about doing something like this over the last decade but decided the time wasn’t yet right,” said John Bourne, executive director of the Sloan Consortium. “It’s true that the open courseware movement is pretty robust, so there are a lot of high-quality course materials out there, but there’s no human backup behind them. I’d be interested to know how you’d find and train faculty and ensure quality without tuition money.”

    Other educators question the logistics of such a plan.

    “The more you get people around the world talking to each other, great, and the more they talk about what they’re learning, just wonderful,” said Philip G. Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. “But I’m not at all sure, when you start attaching that to credits and degrees and courses, that it translates so well.

    “How will they test students? How much will the professors do? How well does the American or British curriculum serve the needs of people in Mali? How do they handle students whose English is not at college level?”

    Mr. Reshef said his new university would use active and retired professors — some paid, some volunteers — along with librarians, master-level students and professionals to develop and evaluate curriculums and oversee assessments.

    He plans to start small, limiting enrollment at 300 students when the university goes online in the fall and offering only bachelor’s degrees in business administration and computer science. Mr. Reshef said the university would apply for accreditation as soon as possible.

    Mr. Reshef hopes to build enrollment to 10,000 over five years, the level at which he said the enterprise should be self-sustaining. Startup costs would be about $5 million, Mr. Reshef said, of which he plans to provide $1 million.

    For all the uncertainties, Mr. Reshef is probably as well positioned as anyone for such an enterprise.

    Starting in 1989, he served as chairman of the Kidum Group, an Israeli test preparation company, which he sold in 2005 to Kaplan, one of the world’s largest education companies. While chairman of Kidum, he built an online university affiliated with the University of Liverpool, enrolling students from more than 100 countries; that business was sold to Laureate, another large for-profit education company, in 2004.

    Mr. Reshef is now chairman of Cramster.com, an online study community offering homework help to college students.

    “Cramster has thousands of students helping other students,” said Mr. Reshef, who lives in Pasadena, Calif., where both Cramster and the new university are based. “These become strong social communities. With these new social networks, where young people now like to spend their lives, we can bring college degrees to students all over the world, third-world students who would be unable to study otherwise. I haven’t found even one person who says it’s a bad idea.”
     
  2. AGS

    AGS New Member

    i checked out on it

    this university isn't accredited yet. Its still in its infancy stages.

    Since college tuition has gone on new HiGHS and the job rate isn't doing well.
    I think this online university can succeed if it gets alot of new members and becomes accredited in the future.

    any thoughts?
     
  3. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    Overall, I've found that if something seems too good to be true that's because it is. (I know, I know, not original). Can these people make it work? Maybe. Am I willing to spend my time pursuing a degree from THIS school and risk the possibility that three, four, five years from now they just pack up their servers and go home? No, I am not. I'd rather spend a small amount of money at a non-US school (like in South Africa or the Netherlands, etc.) than wake up in five years to the news that I've thrown away my TIME on an experimental school that folded.
     
  4. sentinel

    sentinel New Member

    All schools begin as unaccredited and as such might not be the best route for someone looking to earn a degree for purposes of employment. If a person is seeking an education in a subject for personal interest, an unaccredited school offering zero tuition might be a viable option because unlike the library the student will receive a diploma as a testament to the time invested in the pursuit of the knowledge. There are members of this board who have earned degrees from schools that were unaccredited at one time and eventually earned accreditation. As I recall there are a few people here who have earned degrees from schools that remain unaccredited but decided to pursue their studies due to the uniqueness of the degree.

    A school does not earn accreditation until it has been in operation for a certain number of years and presumably has enrolled and graduated a certain number of students, among various other criteria. Only time will tell whether the approach University of the People is taking will be successful.
     
  5. japhy4529

    japhy4529 House Bassist

    How many people out there are interested in studying Business Administration or Computer Science at the undergradate level, purely out of "personal interest?" I would imagine that most people pursue studies in BA or CS primarily for employment purposes. Anyway, at this point this school is not offering degrees.
     
  6. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    I understand your point and it's a good one. My skepticism about this project is not related to the fact that it's an unaccredited fledgling school. It's related more to the fact that it's free. I don't believe that a new school can continue to grow and thrive without some monies coming from the students. Could I be wrong? Perhaps, but they are going to have to prove that it can be done before I'll admit it can be done.
     
  7. sentinel

    sentinel New Member

    Skepticism is good. An similar example of a free product is the GNU/Linux operating system which by and large is developed by volunteers and can be obtained without cost. Companies repackage and sell both the product and services around the product, some even contribute staff programmers to the development effort, much like some schools charge tuition and other fees for the delivery of their product, namely education. And you are right only time will tell whether this school will survive in the long term.
     
  8. BillDayson

    BillDayson New Member

    Is this thing really going to be a university?

    Apparently he's not going to be providing any of the academic content. It sounds like he's going to be creating a social networking site with an academic theme, organized around student peer-discussion of online content that other providers are already supplying for free.

    Isn't that essentially what Chip has been doing right here for peer-peer DL discussion?

    So this thing isn't going to be free after all. Mr. Reshef gets from $25 to $150/class.

    That's pretty cryptic. Will these faculty actually communicate with students? Will they conduct online classes, answer questions and guide discussions? Or will they just endorse Mr. Reshef's syllabi and write homework exercises and final exams that would subsequently be administered and scored by computer?

    Mr. Reshef lives in Pasadena California, so he doesn't have to worry about state approval, does he? My guess is that WASC will be underwhelmed by this concept.

    At $150 per student per class, that would be $1,500,000 gross income for Mr. Reshef for every class these 10,000 students take. (Even at the minimum $25/class poor-country rate, it would be $250,000.) Since he might actually only be running a Degreeinfo-type peer-peer discussion website, administering his online exams and printing his diplomas, it could be very profitable for him.

    I'm wondering if there might be lawsuits from MIT and other universities that put their course content online for free, if entrepeneurs try to use that content for commercial purposes without paying for the privilege. There could be a big intellectual property tangle there.
     
  9. AGS

    AGS New Member

    this is a non for profit school

    I feel the school was designed not just for american students but also to reach people in developing nations achieve some kind of education from limited resources.

    some of you have made good points on accreditation taking for years and also the important numbers of student registration.
     
  10. AGS

    AGS New Member


    well do a research on Mr Reshef. He actually helped some online program at some school in the UK enrolling over 10,000 students.

    I am sure he is aware of the online intellectual property rights.
     
  11. AviTerra

    AviTerra New Member

    Many successful companies such as Facebook and Twitter started out by offering a free service that subsequently attracted a very large user base. These companies had no problem monetizing their user base over time. My guess is that this university will eventually be supported by some form of advertising.
     
  12. Woho

    Woho New Member

    That's still a big questionmark, esp. with Twitter...
     
  13. AGS

    AGS New Member

    twitter


    well myspace, facebook and twitter are all free. so is youtube.
    wikipedia.

    i haven't heard anyone using britannica online .
     
  14. Robert T. Speare

    Robert T. Speare New Member

    I am interested on pursuing a tuition free study leading to a Master Degree in Procurement Management
     

Share This Page