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 Shai Reshef, an entrepreneur and founder of several previous Internet-based educational businesses. “The open source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free. 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.”
Online learning is growing in many different contexts. Through the Open Courseware Consortium, started by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001, universities around the world have posted materials for thousands of courses — as widely varied as Utah State University’s “Lambing and Sheep Management” and MIT’s “Relativistic Quantum Field Theory” — all free to the public. Many universities now post their lectures on the iTunes music store.
For-profit universities like the University of Phoenix and Kaplan University have extensive online offerings. And increasingly, both public universities, like the University of Illinois, and private ones, like Stanford, 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 for exams ($10 to $100), with students from poorer countries paying the lower fees.
Experts in online education say it is an interesting idea, but one that raises many questions.
“We’ve chatted about doing something like this,…