By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: August 25, 2011

University of the People

Students using a University of the People computer center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, one of three set up after the earthquake there in early 2010.

After the earthquake in Haiti destroyed much of the country’s higher-education infrastructure, the University of the People decided to set up three computer centers there, inviting English-speaking students from nearby tent cities to come and work for four hours a day.

“They don’t have electricity, they don’t have computers, there are university students who have to carry water on their head from another mountain,” said Shai Reshef, the Israeli entrepreneur who spent $1 million to create the free university two years ago. “They come in two shifts, for four hours a day, to study. Their need was to the point that we began a feeding program.”

Mr. Reshef sees his project as a way to use the Internet to bring higher education to poor students around the world. It uses free software and has enlisted hundreds of volunteer professors — more, he said, than he has been able to use — to teach 10-week online courses to 1,000 students from more than 100 countries. Starting this fall, students will have to pay $10 to $50 for admission.

In each class, 20 to 40 students are assigned weekly reading material and are required to post their responses and comment on others’ responses. The course materials are deliberately low-tech, with no audio or video, so that students can use them anywhere.

“It’s based on peer learning, so just like at the gym, what you get out of it depends on what you put in,” said Shay David, a software entrepreneur with a Ph.D. from Cornell who taught introductory computer programming.

For Joe Jean, a 23-year-old Haitian from a poor family, the University of the People was the only option for college. “When I heard it was tuition-free, I didn’t think it would be very good,” said Mr. Jean, who hopes to be a computer entrepreneur. “But I’ve learned a lot, and I like the way the instructors support the students and the students support each other.”

The university is not accredited, and it offers programs only in business administration and computer science. But in June, it got two votes of confidence: New York University announced a partnership under which unusually promising but needy University of the People students might be able to enroll at N.Y.U.’s Abu Dhabi campus and receive financial aid, and Hewlett-Packard announced an internship program, saying it believed strongly “in the work UoPeople is doing to democratize higher education.”

“We’re building a model to show that education can be way cheaper than it is, that in developing countries, they could choose to educate every person for not much money,” said Mr. Reshef, who has started and sold other education businesses, but sees the University of the People as a philanthropic contribution to global development.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/education/25future_people.html?_r...