A Conversation With The President Of World’s First Non-Profit, Tuition-Free, Accredited, Online University
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
03-03-2014
Shai Reshef is an Israeli-born entrepreneur who now lives in Pasadena, California. Although his master’s degree is in Chinese politics, he has made his name professionally in private education. He served as chairman and CEO of the Kidum Group, an Israeli test preparation which he sold to Kaplan, Inc. in 2005. He also led KIT eLearning, a subsidiary of Kidum and the eLearning partner of the University of Liverpool. KIT provided MBAs and Master in IT degrees, and was eventually acquired by Laureate Online Education.
In 2009, Reshef founded the University of the People, which in February 2014 received accreditation from the Distance and Education Training Council, a U.S. Department of Education authorized accrediting agency. This made it the world’s first non-profit, tuition-Free, accredited, online university.
In speaking with Reshef, I was curious about his mission, the hurdles the company had to go over in order to achieve its unique distinction, and his plans for the future. As one would expect with a serial entrepreneur, he believes that now that the foundation is in place, the University of the People is well positioned to rapidly grow its business, creating new opportunities for many of the world’s least fortunate people in the process.
(To read the prior nine articles in this series including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Shai, what is the University of the People’s mission?
Shai Reshef: The mission of UoPeople is to offer affordable, quality, online, higher education to any qualified student. We believe that access to higher education is a key ingredient in the promotion of world peace and global economic development. We view higher education as a basic right, and believe that it can both transform the lives of individuals and can be a powerful force for societal change. We believe that education plays a fundamental role in strengthening respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and in promoting understanding and tolerance. We also hope that in the future, other institutions will replicate our model in order to open the gates of higher education to as many students as possible around the world.
Peter High: You have an elite group of partners, including the Clinton Global Initiative, Yale Law School, HP, and the UN among others. How did you go about establishing partners in this mission and what role do they play?
Shai Reshef: Many corporations believe, as we do, that education should be a right and not a privilege, and would like to take part in revolutionizing higher education. Since so many people identify with UoPeople’s mission, more often than not our partners seek us out without any solicitation from our part. By joining us, they also create their future potential employees. Our agreement with Microsoft is the very example of this. Launched in September 2013, the UoPeople Microsoft4Afrika scholarship program will support a total of 1,000 African students to graduate with a world-class academic degree from UoPeople in either Computer Science or Business Administration. The scholarship not only includes financial support to cover all costs associated with studies, but also extra-curricular opportunities including professional training from Microsoft, being mentored by Microsoft employees and internship and job opportunities with Microsoft and their affiliates in Africa upon their graduation. This comprehensive program is providing students with a degree, experience in their industry, a professional network and important life skills and competencies. The program is fostering a new generation of leaders equipped to succeed in the global business and technology world, to enhance their country and region’s social and economic development and help improve the lives of people across Africa.
Additional topics covered in the article include:
Why were these chosen?
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Forbes 30-Under-30 Honoree, Nic Borg, On Technology Enabled Education
02-10-2014
This is the tenth article in the Education Technology Innovation series, and it is fair to say that Nic Borg’s background is unlike any of the other entrepreneurs featured in the series. Like others, he comes from academe, but rather than being a former Stanford professor like Sebastian Thrun or Daphne Koller, or an MIT professor like Anant Agarwal, Borg spent seven years at Kaneland High School in Maple Park, Illinois building web-based tools and learning management solutions. The small-scale innovation that he introduced proved to be a pilot for something bigger to come.
Armed with his practical experience at a Kaneland High School, Borg co-founded Edmodo five and a half years ago. Edmodo is the largest K-12 social learning network, which provides teachers and students a safe and easy way to connect and collaborate; it has been called “the Facebook of education.” It is used heavily in the classroom, but also extends that classroom environment. The mission of the organization is to help all learners reach their full potential, and he believes that by connecting them to the resources and concepts they need, they achieve that goal. It has already had profound implications on students, teachers, parents, and content providers, as he explains herein. He was recently honored by this publication as “30 Under 30” winner.
(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Nic Borg, please visit this link. To read the prior nine articles in this series including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Why was there a need for more of a digital platform and a means of communication with students in new ways? Was there something there saw as lacking in the traditional means of educating their students that was particularly stark to you?
Nic Borg: New ideas developed so rapidly outside the classroom that to really capture students’ attention, teachers had to be just as dynamic and even have to do a bit of a catch-up. Without those tools, without simple ways to get their classrooms online, it just wasn’t possible to get the attention needed from their students to drive that learning process.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Nic, click here.
A Professor With A Western Past Remakes Pakistan’s Entrepreneurial Future
02-03-2014
Umar Saif has done a lot in his 35 years. A Pakistani, he earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge at 22. He began a post doctorate degree at MIT at an age when most of his peers – age wise – had not completed their bachelor’s degrees. He worked at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he was part of the core team that developed system technologies for the $50 million Project Oxygen. He collaborated with Anant Agarwal, now the president of edX, among other legendary computer science and artificial intelligence professors. After spending years away from his native Pakistan, he found that he enjoyed the entrepreneurial spirit of MIT and of the US more generally. However, it was a conversation with a colleague about what he wanted to achieve in his life that got him to rethink his plans for the future. He decided that he wanted to help establish a comparable entrepreneurial hot-bed like the one he found at MIT back in Pakistan.
He returned to the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), where he found that his top students were the equivalent of the top students at MIT, but they did not realize the potential they had. His own story became an inspiration for a series of entrepreneurs, many of whom he has started businesses with. He was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2010, selected as one of top 35 young innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review in 2011 and received a Google faculty research award in 2011.
In 2011, Saif became the Chairman of the Punjab Information Technology Board (PITB), heading all public-sector IT projects in the province of Punjab province. In 2013, Saif was appointed the founding vice-chancellor of the Information Technology University (ITU). At the age of 34, he became the youngest vice-chancellor of a university in Pakistan. Saif has accomplished a lot, but, as he explains it, he has only just gotten started.
(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Umar Saif, please visit this link. This is the ninth article in the education technology innovation series. To read the prior eight articles including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Umar, you recently joined the Information Technology University as the founding vice chancellor. What is the charter of the new university and what role do you plan to play there?
Umar Saif: ITU is focused on cross-disciplinary teaching and research to solve locally relevant problems. It is a publicly chartered university, but run like a private-sector university, much like the land-grant universities in the US. We are focused on research with real-world impact. One of the keystone courses at the university is the Design Lab, where students work with grassroots organizations to build solutions to problems like clean drinking water, maternal healthcare and off-grid energy solutions. The curriculum philosophy is inspired by Olin’s design-oriented learning.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Umar, click here.
Cornell NYC Tech’s Dean On The Future Of Entrepreneurship In New York
01-27-2014
In late 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration put out a request for proposal for a new kind of university program. Recognizing the importance of establishing New York City as a technology hub, he hoped to attract a leading university to establish a graduate school in engineering and computer science in Manhattan, and proposed that it be built on Roosevelt Island.
The proposal submitted by Cornell University was the winner, and though the permanent campus will not be ready until 2017, Cornell NYC Tech has set up shop in Google’s Manhattan offices in Chelsea. Daniel Huttenlocher is dean of the program, and he has an ambitious vision that befits an academic who has experience in the business world. He has hired a Chief Entrepreneurial Officer, and the school has already established deep ties with the start-up community in New York. Huttenlocher measures the success of his program on the number of people who start and who join high growth organizations. Establishing a program with ready access to major corporations, start-ups, and even City Hall means that Cornell NYC Tech is in an enviable position, and will likely be a key player in pushing New York to be the tech start-up hub that has longed to be for some time.
(To listen to an unabridged audio interview with Dean Daniel Huttenlocher, please visit this link. This is the eighth article in the education technology innovation series. To read the prior seven articles including interviews with the heads of Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, and edX, please visitthis link . To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Dan, what is Cornell NYC Tech’s mission?
Daniel Huttenlocher: Our mission is to increase the amount of technology talent in the New York area and in the nation with a particular kind of twist or take on technology talent both in terms of the students and faculty that we are attracting. It is people who have a passion for really deep technological invention and innovation, and at the same time the breadth to engage with real world problems and bring that technology out of the laboratory and classroom into the real world.
We are a new graduate school in New York City in tech disciplines, and we are focused on the disciplines related to the digital information age and the tech sector more generally. We have masters and doctoral students and programs in New York City. We are roughly a year in, as we commenced our beta class in January 2013 with a Masters of Engineering in Computer Science as the first-degree program that we’re offering.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Daniel, click here.
For The Largest Not-For-Profit MOOC, edX, Experimentation Is The Path To Innovation
01-20-2014
MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Professor Anant Agarwal has personified the educator-entrepreneur, as he has had a foot in academe and a foot in new ventures for more than a decade. He has led CSAIL, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, just as he was a founder of Tilera Corporation, which created the Tile multicore processor. He led the development of Raw, an early tiled multicore processor, Sparcle, an early multi-threaded microprocessor, and Alewife, a scalable multiprocessor. He also led the VirtualWires project at MIT and was the founder of Virtual Machine Works. His start-ups have largely been focused on his areas of research and areas of interest, but he had not focused on the education space itself until late 2011.
It was at that point that Agarwal taught what would become MITX’s first massive open online course (MOOC) on circuits and electronics, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. This overwhelming response showed the promise of having his academic and his entrepreneurial pursuits coincide. Agarwal developed a partnership between MIT and nearby Harvard to establish edX. Unlike rivals Coursera and Udacity, edX is a not-for-profit. Therefore, when Agarwal thinks about the competitive landscape among the MOOCs, his perspective is “the more the merrier.” In fact, in June of last year, edX became open sourced, and the source code, OpenedX, has led to interesting collaborations with Google, Stanford University, and even with countries such as France and China.
I spoke with Agarwal multiple times in recent months to ask him how edX is evolving, and what he foresees for the future of edX and for the academic institutions that they draw from.
(To hear an extended audio interview with Anant Agarwal, please visit this link. This is the seventh article in the Education Technology Innovation series. To read past interviews including interviews with the CEOs of Udacity, Coursera, and Khan Academy, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: As edX enters its third year in existence, what key lessons have you drawn thus far?
Anant Argawal: The power of edX and of MOOCs more generally is to democratize education. People want to learn no matter their circumstance or their age, and the experience of our students shows definitively that this is the case. We have many people who are in the workforce who use edX to develop new skills to employ in their jobs. Therefore, we are thinking more broadly.
A related example is our partnership with global steel manufacturer Tenaris. Through their adoption of the Open edX platform, Tenaris will enhance their existing training programs delivered through Tenaris University to nearly 27,000 employees worldwide. We have established a comparable relationship with the IMF.
We also have announced a partnership with Davidson College and the College Board to host Advanced Placement (AP) course modules for high school students, as well. So what began as university-centric idea is migrating to the pre and post university settings.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Anant, click here.
A British MOOC Start Up With A 44 Year Old Parent
01-13-2014
Much time and attention has been given to the MOOCs started in the US, but as I have mentioned in my interview with Mike Feerick of ALISON, the phenomenon actually first emerged in Europe. Another more recent entry to the MOOC field out of the United Kingdom is FutureLearn. Unlike other prominent MOOCs like Udacity, Coursera, and edX that feature university content, FutureLearn is not led by a former academic. Simon Nelson is a businessman, but he was a logical choice to head FutureLearn given his experience working in a variety of media fields that have been threatened and transformed by technology. As a result, Nelson has been programmed to see opportunity in the chaos.
FutureLearn also has the advantage of a 44 year old pre-cursor to the MOOCs: Open University. The university has many things in common with the MOOCs — it has an open entry policy, and the majority of courses are taken off-campus anywhere in the world. As such, Nelson has been able to work with Open University Vice Chancellor Martin Bean to learn from the decades of experiences and experiments forged, and many of them have translated well to the new format. Therefore, while FutureLearn is a new entrant to this marketplace, it stands to become a formidable one.
Peter High: FutureLearn recently offered its first course online. What course was chosen to be the first offering, and how it was chosen?
Simon Nelson:The first course was “The Secret Power of Brands.” It was a ten-week course delivered by University of East Anglia. We chose it because it is both powerful but also accessible. We used our early MOOCs to test a range of course durations – ten, eight, six, and two weeks – to gain insight into what worked best for learners.
A second run of the course has been scheduled for February this year, along with a number of other courses that originally featured in 2013. The second run of “The Secret Power of Brands” has been re-versioned to run over six weeks.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Simon, click here.
The Most Influential Person In Education Technology
01-06-2014
I have had the a good fortune of speaking with good number of the leaders in education technology today. Since so many of these players have emerged from academe, the competition between companies is fierce certainly, but there is also a collegial willingness to acknowledge the successes of other companies. In the case of non-profits like edX, CEO Anant Agarawal says, the more companies that enter this space, the merrier. (Stay tuned for my interview with Agarwal on January 20th.) Several of these leaders acknowledge that the most influential person to the MOOC landscape has been Salman Khan. As Agarwal lists the genesis of the MOOCs, he lists Khan and his Khan Academy first among the major players. Sebastian Thrun acknowledged in my interview with him that “I stumbled into this after listening to a gentleman named Sal Khan of Khan Academy. In his speech he noted that he had tens of millions of students in his classes. I was teaching at Stanford at the time and had tens of dozens of students in my classes, and I felt I should try something different and see if we could do what I do and scale it to many people.” In fact, in my podcast interview with Thrun, as he listed those who had been most influential to him over the course of his career, he listed Khan on the short list.
With this in mind, I looked forward to meeting this education guru. I met him in his office, and had a chance to see the microphone he uses for the tutorials that he delivers. He was informal, dressed in a t-shirt and shorts, and the microphone that I used to record our podcast interview was perched on a log that stood in between us. He was affable, bright, and the leadership skills that enabled him to be class president of his senior class at MIT and of his class at Harvard Business School before becoming a serial entrepreneur was quite clear. What followed as a fascinating conversation about the genesis of Khan Academy, his thoughts on the future of education, and his beliefs about the balance between technology enabled learning versus classroom learning.
Peter High: Sal, there is the famous story of your cousin, Nadia, who needed some help with her math class in seventh grade as the genesis of the idea that has become Khan Academy. What insights in the early days helped you understand the scale of the need that you hoped to fill?
Salman Khan: I grew up with plenty of smart people. They would beat me at chess, they could solve brain teasers before I could, but then they would struggle in algebra. These were incredibly smart people who simply did not have the foundation in math that I had. I saw the same thing with my cousin, Nadia. She had actually gotten “A”s and “B”s in every math class. Despite that, she had some serious gaps in her knowledge that became more significant as the content became more difficult. This really hit me as a real opportunity.
My background is in software, and I have always had these romantic notions of starting writing software that could help people learn, so I started writing a little tool that would give Nadia and her brothers and the other people I was working with practice problems. I didn’t trust them when they said how long it took them or whatever else. I put a database behind it and that became a useful tutorial tool because I could see where they had gaps, I could intervene appropriately, and I could give them as much practice as they needed…
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Sal, click here.
Lessons From The CEO OF The First Ever MOOC
12-31-2013
There has been much press for the massive open online courses or MOOCs, including in my series of interviews to date with Sebastian Thrun and Daphne Koller, CEOs of Udacity and Coursera respectively. If one is new to these companies, one might be under the impression that the MOOC phenomenon is less than two years old. That is not the case. The company that many credit as being the first ever MOOC is Advance Learning Interactive Systems ONline, better known as ALISON. Irish-American entrepreneur, Mike Feerick founded that company in 2007, and whereas many other companies in this industry are still trying to determine the business models, Feerick has nearly seven years of testing, experimenting, and succeeding behind him. In this interview, Feerick talks about the genesis of the idea, his rationale for focusing on vocational training, and his vision for the future of the company.
(To listen to an extended audio version of this interview, please visit Forum on World Class IT. This is the fourth in the education technology series. To read the prior interviews, please follow this link. To read future interviews with the CEOs of Khan Academy, edX, and FutureLearn among other companies, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Mike, as a MOOC pioneer, what was the inspiration behind ALISON?
ALISON started with seven computer literacy courses because it was a very practical field of focus. Prior to launching ALISON we charged for the service, however when we changed our model to free, a curious thing happened: our paying clients wanted to continue to pay as they did not believe that something free could also be of sufficient value! We have changed a lot of minds on that score, and in that sense ALISON has helped open up the market for free education for other MOOCS to follow.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Mike, click here.
For the World’s Largest MOOC, Broader is Better
12-16-2013
Last week, I kicked off a series on education technology with an interview with Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity. Daphne Koller who co-founded and is the co-CEO of Coursera, by some measures the largest of the for-profit educational technology companies offering massive open online courses or MOOCs with over five million students across most countries, has much in common with Thrun. They both were foreign-born Stanford professors with backgrounds in artificial intelligence when they started the companies they currently lead. Each has also taken a leave of absence from Stanford in order to pursue their current opportunities.
Though their companies compete, they have chosen very different areas of focus. Udacity, like several other companies that provide MOOCs has chosen to focus on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. Coursera has chosen a much broader offering, including many disciplines in the humanities. This breadth of offering has been a strength of the company in building a broad student-base, and it has signed up over 60 universities as partners. That said, it has required particularly creative approaches both process and technology-wise in order to facilitate learning, collaboration, and grading.
Koller admits that some of the data surrounding MOOCs might suggest that students are not learning as much as they could, as drop-out rates are substantial, but she argues that new metrics are needed in order to determine success or failure.
(To hear an extended audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the third in the series of Education Technology articles to be featured this month and next. To read the past articles in the series, please follow this link. To receive updates on interviews with the CEOs of Khan Academy, edX, FutureLearn, and ALISON among others, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Daphne, Coursera is still in its relative infancy. What was the inspiration for starting the company?
Daphne Koller: I have been working in the States for about five years, and the pace of change in education innovation has been dramatic. In the Fall of 2011, we put three Stanford courses up on the platform we had developed, and we were pleased to find that enrollment for these courses was 100,000 students or more. I think when we saw that the impact and the opportunities that this open platform had provided in education for this many people at a lower cost, then that caused us to say we really have to live up to that opportunity.
To listen to a Forum on World Class IT podcast interview with Sebastian, click here.
Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun On The Future Of Education
12-09-2013
There are few entrepreneurs who can compete with Sebastian Thrun in terms of creativity and breadth of innovation. He led the development of Stanley, a robotic vehicle on the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. He was a founder of the Google X Lab, and parlayed his earlier success with Stanley into the Google driverless car system. He also was among the leaders who developed Google Glass. All the while he was a professor first at Carnegie Mellon and then at Stanford.
In early 2012, based on inspiration from Salman Khan of Khan Academy, he co-founded Udacity, a for-profit education company offering massive open online courses, or MOOCs. Thrun’s Stanford course “CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car” was among the first couple of courses offered through Udacity, and it attracted 160,000 students in 190 countries. The youngest was ten and the oldest was 70. Moreover, none of the top-400 students were Stanford students. He was so excited about what he learned, that he gave up his post at Stanford to focus on Udacity full-time.
(To hear an extended audio version of this interview, please visit this link. To read interviews with other education technology leaders such as the CEOs of Coursera, edX, Khan Academy, and FutureLearn, please click the “Follow” link above. To read about Thrun’s thoughts on what immigrating to America has meant to him, please read this article.)
Peter High: You have been an entrepreneur in a variety of fields. You have taught and applied artificial intelligence. You helped spawn Google Glass. Now you are the CEO of a prominent education company offering MOOCs. What are the common denominators among the opportunities you have pursued?
Sebastian Thrun: Well there are two things to it, one is I love to pick problems that are really big and important. In education, we seek to address the problem of how to democratize and bring education everywhere. The second thing that drives me is I love to learn, and I love to do things I haven’t done before. And I enjoy the intellectual exercise of doing something new. Ideas like Google Glass emerged from such exploration.
