A Tuition-Free College Degree
I would like to share with you a new model of higher education—a model that, once expanded, can enhance the collective intelligence of millions of creative and motivated individuals who otherwise would be left behind.
Shai Reshef
Biography
Shai Reshef is the Founder & President of the University of the People (UoPeople), the world's first tuition-free, online academic institution. Reshef has twenty years of experience in the international education market. From 1989 to 2005, he served as Chairman of the Kidum Group--the largest for-profit educational services company based in Israel. Reshef joined Kidum in 1989 when it was a single product company with revenues of $100,000. Under his leadership, Kidum grew to become a company with annual revenues in excess of $25 million, with over 1,000 employees and 50,000 students a year. In 2005, he sold the company to Kaplan, one of the world's largest education companies and a subsidiary of the Washington Post. Between 2001 and 2004, while continuing as the chairman of Kidum, Reshef lived in the Netherlands where he chaired KIT eLearning, a subsidiary of Kidum. KIT is the eLearning partner of the University of Liverpool and the first online university outside of the U.S. KIT provides MBA and M.Sc. degrees in IT. The company was sold in 2004 to Laureate. In 2009, Reshef was named one of Fast Company's "100 Most Creative People in Business," selected by OneWorld as one of its "People of 2009" and awarded a fellowship by Ashoka. He also joined the United Nations' Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development (GAID) as a High-level Adviser, working closely with the organization to cultivate a platform for open and inclusive policy dialogue on the role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in education development. An expert on innovations in education and the intersection of education and technology, Reshef has spoken internationally at conferences, including TED Conferences, DLD: Digital, Life, Design in Munich, Hacking Education in New York, the World Economic Forum on the Middle East in Jordan, UNDESA-GAID Global Forum in Monterrey, Mexico, and Fourth University Industry Council Symposium in Kolkata, India. He has also lectured several times at Yale University and, in March, he will present the keynote address at Google's Higher Education Summit followed by an April appearance at Harvard University, Stanford University and Oxford University, among others. He has presented the keynote address at Google's Higher Education Summit and has been a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Africa. Reshef holds a B.A., magna cum laude, from Tel Aviv University and an M.A. from the University of Michigan in Chinese Politics.EDUCAUSE Publications
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Chapter 14: University of the People
A chapter from Game Changers
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Educating the Many
In an age of dropping technology costs, unprecedented access to the Internet, and the free exchange of information online, the divides between the haves and the have-nots, including in postsecondary education, can be bridged.