The latest experiment in peer-to-peer education kicks off next month – a new institution in which students will learn in virtual communities using free online materials and social-networking tools.
But now the venture, called University of the People, faces big questions. Among them: Can it get accreditation? And can a college that charges so little and relies so much on self-teaching retain students?
Since it was announced in January, University of the People has accumulated a pile of publicity, spurred by its populist marketing pitch as the “first nonprofit, tuition-free online university.”
“The idea is to reach the hundreds of millions of people who graduate high school, have all the ability and the right to study in an academic institution, but cannot do it either because they don’t have the money or because there aren’t enough institutions,” said Shai Reshef, an Israeli entrepreneur who founded the project. “In quite a few countries in the world, the demand is much more than the supply.”
via The Wired Campus – New Tuition-Free ‘University of the People’ Tries to Democratize Higher Ed – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Full article
If your child has a life-threatening disease and you’re desperate to read the latest research, you’ll be dismayed to learn that you can’t — at least not without hugely expensive subscriptions to a bevy of specialized journals or access to a major research library.
Your dismay might turn to anger when you realize that you paid for this research. Through the National Institutes of Health alone, American taxpayers funnel more than $28 billion annually into medical research. That’s leaving aside the billions more in public spending on state universities or the tax exemptions granted for gifts to private campuses.
American institutions of higher education are knowledge machines of unprecedented fecundity, but much of the knowledge they produce is locked up in high-priced scholarly journals that most people can’t easily get. Citizens thus find themselves in the position of paying for research and then paying again to buy it back from academic journals whose prices have been spiraling upward. Library Journal says that U.S. journal prices rose 9% last year alone. The average chemistry-journal subscription, to cite a single egregious example, was $3,429 for one year.