Virtually free (max $100) university degree. How does that sound?
With a rising world population and an increasingly high tech environment the demand for graduates is rising exponentially. However higher education is expensive and getting more expensive by the day. I happen to live in one of the few remaining countries where higher education is still free to students but there is pressure on the Danish and Swedish governments to cut corners there too as the cost of the welfare state rises. This means a huge amount of pent up demand worldwide both from the potential students and employers.
Along comes Shai Reshef, an Israeli entrepreneur with a background in e-learning in higher education who has just opened what he calls the University of the People. I must confess that when I got an email about this that I was nano-seconds away from clicking on ‘junk’ but something made me read on and made me investigate further. What I found was an online university with many unique features. One aspect which kept my finger away from the ‘junk’ button was that this is an initiative supported by the United Nations.
How can an organisation offer a university degree at such low cost? The answer is a mix of peer tutoring and use of open source materials. We have already heard so much about the materials being made available for free by institutions such as MIT and Apples uTunes where you can access the best university lecture sessions for free. These materials have been organised by volunteer professors into a two learning paths, one for Business Administration and the other for Computer Science. To register as a student you need to have a good command of the English anguage and a high school diploma. The study part of the degree is free. You pay only when you take the exams and even then that is on a sliding scale depending on which part of the world you are from. On the face of it this could be a very lonely and isolating experience but this is where the other main plank of the concept comes into play, peer tutoring. There is a strict timetable where each study section is allocated a week during which time you are expected to do the readings and prepare answers to some questions. The materials are text-based in order to make them as accessible as possible so that people are not excluded because they do not have broadband Internet access. The answers to the questions are then posted to a forum and you and your core study group are then expected to debate and comment the answers to the questions in the text based forums. If the study group cannot come to an agreed understanding of the materials then there are external instructors to call on to help and adjudicate but the expectation is that the majority of the work will be done within the study group.
I spoke with Shai Reshef about this and he is convinced that this is the way forward since he has seen the power of social networking such as Facebook and also the same phenomenon applied to learning in Cramster.com for which he worked for a while. You can hear my conversation with him in the latest episode of our podcast Absolutely Intercultural. I also included in the show the discussion I had with Debbie Swallow of 4C International about famous people who could qualify as role models when discussing cultural competence. It seems that Michelle Obama got the most votes for that one but maybe as the university of the People becomes more established then Shai Reshef could also qualify for his greater vision of a more peaceful world through understanding and putting learning to work for the good of the community.
In order to enrol in the University of the People you have to have a high school diploma but even this is out of reach for millions of people in the world today. I have mentioned previously the great work being done to promote basic education by Sugata Mitra but this week my attention was drawn to Babar Ali who was dubbed the world’s youngest headmaster for his work in setting up a school for his fellow villagers in the Punjab so that the children there can get a basic education which they otherwise cannot afford. This is also a great example of peer teaching in action.