New Delhi: The UN Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) has announced the launch of world's first tuition-free online university.

The university would use open-source technology and course material, alongside peer-to-peer teaching to bring a high level of learning to its students, sources at the United Nation (UN) said.

The initiative, rightly called the University of the People (UoPeople), is part of the agency's focus on education for year 2009 and is aimed at offering higher education to the masses.

"This year the Global Alliance has focused its attention on education [and] how ICT can advance education goals around the world," a GAID spokesperson said.

"For hundreds of millions of people around the world higher education is no more than a dream," UoPeople Founder Shai Reshef said pointing out that people are constrained by finances, the lack of institutions in their region, or are not able to leave home to study at a university for personal reasons.

He further stressed that the University will enable people to continue their studies from home and at minimal cost by using open-source technology, open course materials, e-learning methods and peer-to-peer teaching.

"The high-quality, low-cost and global pedagogical model embraces the worldwide presence of the Internet and dropping technology costs to bring collegiate level studies to even the poorest and most remote places on earth," the University claimed on its website.

Reshef further said that in order to open access to as many people as possible, no material requiring broadband connections, such as video, would be used, which would enable people restricted to dial-up connections to follow courses.  

And while, he hopes that there would be associated projects to supply computers to those without them, Reshef hoped that people without computers and Internet can still be able access, either through a centralised public computer, an Internet cafe or private machines.

According to sources, while a minimum of 12 years of study is mandatory pre requisite for those seeking admission at UoPeople, students would also need to pass an orientation course in English and computer skills in order to continue on to the major, which would require 40 courses, similar to most undergraduate degrees.

Students will be placed in classes of 20, after which they can log on to a weekly lecture, discuss its themes with their peers in a kind of chat room helping each other understand the material and take a test online.

If students still had problems after discussing the material with their peers, they could go to a course forum where they could consult with academics.
Reshef also informed that to fund the University, there would be a sliding scale of fees for admissions and exams—depending on the World Bank’s wealth-ranking of each student's home country—from US $15 to US $50 for admission.

Besides, students would also need to pay a processing fee for every test ranging from US $10 to US $100. For the University to sustain its operation, it needs 15,000 students and US $6 million, of which Reshef has donated US $1 million of his own money.

The University also plans to mine much of its course material from courses already made available on the Internet, free of charge, by major institutions like Stanford University in the United States. "However, the term open-use has to be defined carefully to avoid problems," he clarified.

Talking about the initiative Bangladesh's Ambassador to the United States Humayun Kabir and a member of the UoPeople advisory committee said, "The University is an innovation that will be remembered for a long time because of the degree to which it would increase access to higher education around the world."