Is this too good to be true? Or too far out there? Maybe not… an Israeli entrepreneur by the name of Shai Reshef has a plan to create the “University of the People” as an online only, educational school that is pretty much free.
There are still potentials issue such as language and cultural, but Mr. Reshef already has taken a few of these into account. There are monetary issues as well. This nonprofit startup will cost $5 million, but Mr. Reshaf said he will cover $1 million of that.
“”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.”
To read the full article from the NYTimes.com click here…
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