Admissions open: Virtual varsity just a click away Tamar Lewin
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.
“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,” 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 MIT — 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 US, 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 higher ones. Reshef 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. NYT NEWS SERVICE
Tamar Lewin
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.“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,” 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 MIT — 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 US, 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 higher ones. Reshef 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. NYT NEWS SERVICE
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