The Edge: U. of the People’s growth goals include redoubling on the American market

The founder of the all-online global institution will use proceeds from an education prize to develop more programs for refugees and Americans seeking more-affordable degrees. ADVERTISEMENT [The Edge Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around higher ed. This week I report on an online global university looking to raise its presence in the United States and on how a higher-ed group long known as an IT organization wants to alter that image. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. A global online university aims to deepen its presence in the United States Seven months ago, the founder and president of the low-cost, all-online University of the People told me his next goal was to develop degrees in Spanish to better serve some of the millions of Venezuelan refugees around the world. This month, thanks to the folks behind the lucrative [Yidan Prize]( Shai Reshef found a way to fulfill that wish — and more. Reshef has just been named the 2023 winner of the prize for education development. Along with new degree offerings in Spanish, he now plans to use a portion of the $3.8 million in total prize money to make the 15-year-old university a bigger player in the higher-education market here in the United States, arguing that it can fill the nation’s need for higher-ed options that are more affordable for working adults, immigrants, undocumented students, and others. (Michelene Chi, a professor of science and teaching at Arizona State University, won the prize for education research for her work on applying active-learning approaches to teaching, and plans to use the institutional share of the money to build out professional-development offerings to help school teachers apply the work in their classrooms.) The University of the People has been fascinating to me since it began, and honestly, I’ve been looking for a reason to follow up with Reshef since my last substantive coverage — [a video interview with him six years ago.]( Back then, the university enrolled about 10,000 students. Enrollment has grown to 137,000 today, with most of the teaching and advising still handled by a team of volunteers now numbering more than 40,000 from around the world. That model, and its use of open-educational resources for all courses, are part of what keeps the university so affordable. As has been the case from the start, serving refugees is still a vital part of its mission. Reshef said they now number about 16,500 of the overall enrollment, many of whom come from Syria. (The university teaches primarily in English but its bachelor’s degree in business is offered in Arabic; about 26,000 students take the program in that language.) As part of the United Nations Refugee Agency effort, the university has pledged to enroll 25,000 refugees by 2030, and Reshef said he expects it will have more than that well before then. The university also serves students in other dire circumstances. Right now, for example, it’s teaching about 3,000 women in Afghanistan despite the Taliban’s prohibitions against women getting an education. “We actually ask them not to leave their homes,” for their own protection, Reshef told me. And it allows them to enroll under fake names. He said more than 20,000 women from Afghanistan have applied: “We wish we had the funding to serve all of them.” The university doesn’t charge tuition but assesses an examination fee for each course; the overall cost to students adds up to less than $2,500 for an associate degree, under $5,000 for a bachelor’s, and under $4,000 for a master’s. Scholarships cover the costs of those fees for the Afghani women — and many others. But Reshef said the need far outweighs the university’s resources. Aside from an anonymous $10-million gift in 2021, this $3.8-million prize is the biggest gift the university has ever received. (The Yidan Prize money is awarded as a split between the winners and their institutions; Reshef is donating his share to the university.) Improved fund raising is a major priority for the university. It employs 500 people around the world and one of them is a new VP for advancement. Last year it also brought on a veteran academic leader, Marie Cini, as its provost, to help it gain regional accreditation. It’s been [accredited by the Distance Education Accrediting Commission since 2014](. The university’s mission and cost structure have always been compelling to me — in many ways a model for other colleges on how an institution can live out its values. Beyond that, I was never quite sure what to make of its impact in the United States. With this prize money, Reshef seems determined to make that mark clearer. He plans to develop a new bachelor’s in general studies that he hopes will appeal to American students, including some of the 40 million with some college but no degree. Reshef also told me he wants to expand the university’s share of American students from 20 percent of its overall enrollment to 30 percent, both to “open the door wider” to populations here that could use the affordable option and to reinforce the university’s reputation as an American institution. People from around the world, he said, “want to study at an American university with American students.” Educause aims to broaden its identity beyond IT Strategic plans aren’t really my jam. (Are they anybody’s, really?) But a few elements from the one Educause just released, in conjunction with its annual meeting this week in Chicago, caught my attention. For example, the organization long identified as a IT organization — despite the many librarians, provosts, deans, and professors who also engage with it — is ditching that narrower identity. “Continuing to use IT as shorthand for ‘the Educause community’ is no longer adequate or even accurate,” as John O’Brien, its president, [recently wrote](. More concretely, the plan calls for the organization to play a bigger role in the ed-tech marketplace. Considering how much colleges spend on these products, that’s an interesting development. Already, Educause has begun offering [a service that evaluates courseware]( produced by commercial and nonprofit providers, and a [“dashboard”]( designed to guide colleges as they acquire administrative software. But when I caught up with O’Brien this week by phone, he told me his “far cooler and more interesting” goal is to change the way ed tech is marketed and sold. Instead of vendors bombarding chief information officers’ email inboxes with sales pitches, he hopes Educause can develop vehicles through which vendors and colleges can collaborate earlier and develop products that are “more responsive” to institutions’ actual needs. He’s also eager to build on [the standards Educause has developed around cybersecurity and privacy in ed-tech products]( and find more ways to elevate vendors who meet those goals — and additional ones. That’s where the idea gets especially exciting to me. At last year’s Educause annual meeting, O’Brien and I were part of a panel on how colleges and vendors might [imbue more of their ed-tech deals with “digital equity”]( by, for example, ensuring that vendors offer training on use of products at institutions where staffs are stretched thin. Whether Educause does ultimately develop approaches that reward vendors for working creatively with low-resourced and minority-serving institutions is still to be determined. But O’Brien told me that’s the kind of sway the association is trying to develop for its members — “to influence not just the product,” he said, “but how you can implement it.” What I heard while on the road The most compelling — and unsettling — thing I heard while attending the recent P3-EDU conference at the University of Colorado at Denver actually had nothing to do with public-private partnerships in higher ed. It was a comment from a panel that included Jamie Merisotis, president and chief executive of the Lumina Foundation, describing the work of a team at the foundation that looks out on the horizon to spot trends of societal concern. A few years ago, he said, the team foresaw the emergence of the backlash to efforts that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Yup, they got that right. So I was interested to know what they’re seeing now. The answer: a backlash to efforts to mitigate climate change and growing support for authoritarianism accompanied by declining support for democracy. These developments aren’t something colleges should ignore. And as Merisotis noted, the second one, in particular, could require some out-of-the-box thinking. “This is not,” he said, “an old ‘civic learning’ challenge.” A bot to assist students with financial aid This year there’s a new, simplified FAFSA form, but it won’t be available until December, two months later than usual. To help ease the filing crunch — and encourage students with financial need to apply for federal student aid — the folks at Benefits Data Trust have just released [an updated version of their chatbot]( to help students who have questions about the form as they get ready to file it. The AI–powered bot, called Wyatt, has been updated with the form’s latest changes and is free to use. An earlier version of Wyatt debuted in the fall of 2019, and research on its use since then found that it helped boost the rate in which students completed and filed the form, especially those who are low-income. Sounds like a tool colleges and college-advising groups should be letting folks know about. A clarification: In [the last issue of The Edge]( I used the word “accredit” to describe the Higher Learning Commission’s plans concerning alternative credentials. While the commission does plan to develop a service that would evaluate organizations that offer such credentials, its president says the agency does not plan to call that work “accreditation.” Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, [find them here](. To receive your own copy, free, register [here](. 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