The UN's University of the People

A leading arm of the United Nations working to spread the benefits of information technology today announced the launch of the first ever tuition-free online university.

As part of this year’s focus on education, the UN Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) presented the newly formed University of the People, a non-profit institution offering higher education to the masses.

source: www.un.org... (May 19 2009)

Tuition is free, but there is a $15-$50 admission fee, depending on country of residency, and a processing fee per each test, $10-$100 depending on the amount of content covered. Only entry requirement is to have the equivalence of a high school diploma and a sufficient level of English.

The University keeps their costs/tuition at a minimum with the use of open-source technology, open course materials, e-learning methods and peer-to-peer teaching. Students log-on for a weekly lecture, discuss its themes with their peers and take a test all online. There are voluntary professors, post-graduate students and students in other classes who also offer advice and consultation.

For their charter set of classes, without any promotional efforts, 200+ students from 52 different countries have registered.

Subjects offered in Business and Computer Science. I was expecting something more closely related to UN objectives, like maybe International Relations, Diplomacy or World Politics... but many this shouldn't be any surprise... business and technology are the tools of the NWO after all?

[edit on 8-6-2009 by The All Seeing I]

In light of what happened at the University of Delaware, i'm curious to see what bias the curriculum of the University of the People will have.





[edit on 13-6-2009 by The All Seeing I]

reply to post by The All Seeing I


So it looks ok at first sight, maybe a lot of people who are not able to go to college will make a good use out of this? at least they will be able to learn something that may be useful in the future.

One thing i noticed after looking around on the web site:

These programs may in the future, lead towards undergraduate degrees. However, no degrees will be granted before the university gets proper authorization and/or accreditation.

So, basically, students will have to pay for tests but will get nothing at the end, except of course for the knowledge acquired, but the university may never get the accreditation and students will never get anything they can use to validate their knowledge and get a job? that doesn't sound like a good deal to me. But it may still be a good choice for those who can't learn on their own and/or don't want to do research online for learning material.

I didn't find any link to online reading material or anything like that so i suppose you need to pay the admission fee to see those?

A good alternative may be:

MitOpenCourseWare

Which offers a lot of free papers and reading material for several courses. But you need to go and make sense of which ones you need to read first and on your own

I was expecting something more closely related to UN objectives

Not sure, but to me it seems the UN is not really involved on this, at least not directly, there is not a single reference to the UN on the web site and they only talk about it as if it was some very small project not wort big funding.

The site says they need 6 million and 16,000 students or so, what will happen if they don't get the money or the students?

[edit on 14-6-2009 by Kaifan]

Thank you for turning me on to MitOpenCourseWare... shows you how altruistic such intentions can be. The potential is really exciting to see as it gradually evolves into reality.

The ties to the UN are substantial, though appear experimental... the lack of funding i think is intentional. They are testing to see what means of finding will emerge. I can see they have already thought through the human resources end of the equation to serve this goal. If they can successfully pull this off, it could really rock the boat for every on and offline institution. Challenging them to all find ways to bring their tuition down.