Shai Reshef
speaker
99 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Shai Reshef’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So here it is. KIT was a great company. We decided to sell it to L'Oreal. Their name was not L'Oreal at the time. It was Sylvan Learning. Then they changed their name. And I went to New York, semi-retired. But Very fast, I realized and my family realized that I'm not the retired person. I'm too hyper. And I felt that I want to continue.
But it was also clear to me that I don't want to do more of the same. I sold two businesses. I felt that it's my turn to give back. And for me to give back was, and that's my personality, I want to do it in a way that will have an impact on the world. And having impact on the world is obviously education. Because when you think about it, when you educate one person, you can change a life.
But if you educate many, you can change the world. So I start looking around and I wasn't sure how to do it and what exactly I want to do. But then through a friend, I met a company that wanted me to become involved. And I met them, two young kids, not that young, but, you know, in their early 20s, young. And I said, what do you do?
And they said, you know, we have a website, obviously in education, where students come every day. with their homework online and professors come online and offer them help to help them with their homework. And I said, and what do the professor do? They said, well, they get nothing. They get karma points, which worth nothing. It's just a prestige.
I said, listen, I know the world and I know education and I understand a little bit psychology. If you help students with their homework, You are a tutor. If you're a tutor, why won't you take money? I said, well, you don't understand the internet. I said, okay, I'm willing to learn.
And I came to their website and I realized that every time students come online, there are hundreds of professors who are willing to help them for free. What they get in return is karma points, which worth nothing. And I said, wait a second. By now, if you look at what makes higher education
You need content, but there was already open educational resources, which means content that professors put online for free. There is open source technology, free technology. And if there are professors that are willing to teach for free, actually, this is what you need for a university. All I had to do is to put it together and create tuition-free university. So that's where the idea came from.
So I said, okay, it was open source technology, open educational resources and volunteers. I said, this is a university. All I have to do, as I said, is to put it together. So I went to a conference in Munich. And I announced that I'm going to start a tuition-free university.
And by the way, I should have said that when I was in KIT, I realized that the main problem is that so many people need education. but they can't afford it. And when I was thinking about creating University of the People, I realized I read a UNESCO statement on that year in 2009 that in 2025, right now, there will be 100 million students without universities to serve them. So I said, okay.
I announced the university in Munich. The next day, the New York Times wrote a page about it. And the following day, I already had hundreds of emails from professors who said, wow, we want to help. And they built the New York City.
When I announced the University of the People, I knew what it takes to build a university because I had a university in Europe and I knew what it takes, which was a great plus because otherwise, what do you need in order to create a university?
Second, from the very beginning, I had amazing people who came to help from our provost, who came from Columbia University and the vice provost, from deans who came from NYU and Princeton. And those people taught me what I need in order to build a university, and they built it. So most of the manpower was volunteers, which saves millions of dollars along the years. We did need capital.
I invested some money originally, but we worked extremely fast because the idea was we are not going to become a regular university. We are going to give the students what they need in order to succeed, do it in the most efficient way that it can be done, and the fastest way. So I announced the university on the 27th of January. By April, we start enrolling students.
By September, we already started teaching. It was extremely fast. We built the courses while teaching. All were built by volunteers. And Technology, we use open source technology. So it was very, very fast and efficient. And luckily, I had amazing people on my side who did it.
Well, the first time I met the accreditation agency, I felt like it's really easy because what they said, look, here are the standards. Just follow the standards and you can get accredited. Sure. Okay. Sounds very easy. I remember going out, calling to my co-CEO at KIT and say, wow, you know how easy it is to get accredited. You're just following the standards. It was a long road.
We received our initial accreditation in 2014 by the DEAC, stands for Distance Education Accreditation Commission, which is a national accreditation. A lot of the institutions are like ourselves for distance. And you need to meet a lot of standards because in order to get accredited, All your courses need to be evaluated, that they meet the standards.
They need to see that you have all the procedures to accept the students, to serve the students, and to verify that they meet the standards. Then they check the learning outcomes. So it really checks every single element of your operation. It took us actually, you know, from 2010 or 11 when we started until 2014, when we got initially accredited, which was a huge thing for us.
We had about 500 students when we had our initial accreditation. Now we have 153,000 10 years later. So it was a long, a long road. While having the DAC, which is a great accreditation, we get a lot of push from our students or requests from our students to get regional accreditation as well. Because in the U.S. system, there are national and there are regional.
And regional, they are older, they are more traditional, and they are perceived by many as better accreditation. And, you know, we're there not for ourselves. We're there for our students. And if the students want, we need to do it. One of the challenges that we had with our initial accreditation is that, for example, Canada do not accept our accreditation for master level.
So there was a need for another accreditation. So for the last five years, we worked on another accreditation. And two weeks ago, we got it. It's WASC, stands for Western Accreditation Secondary Commission, which is a regional accreditation. And now we have the same accreditation as Stanford and Berkeley and UCLA. You can't get any higher academic accreditation in the U.S.,
Showing 21–40 of 99 · page 2 of 5
← Previous
Next →