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.
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Appearances
So we are looking for a government in Africa to work together with us to solve the shortage of seats and to show the other countries that solution is there and to be like the cell phone did to the landline. Instead of having more and more lines, they just jump to cell phones. And the same with universities.
Instead of building more and more and more physical universities, go online and you can serve everyone. So our project right now, we identify seven countries where they are relatively politically stable and have strong international companies' presence. And we want the companies to team up with us.
And the idea is to work with the government and with the companies to identify what education the companies need in order to hire local people. We are going to offer this education to educated people. And together, we are going to educate the people, offer them jobs, and show how We educate many people.
So if your companies operate in Africa and if you want to do good to Africa and to yourself there, because you will hire people, we are more than open to talk to you. And obviously, anyone who wants to help us sponsor any type of students that need help, sure, come along.
Your other question was about sustainability and about how you continue doing it, even though it's getting hard sometimes, et cetera. I believe from day one that any NGO should be sustainable, try to be sustainable from its revenues rather than from donations. Because if you depend on donations, one day and you are gone. I mean, look at what happened right now. Trump cutting a lot of...
quite a few NGOs will close down. Well, I felt that we should charge minimum from the students, from those who can pay, and this amount should enable us to operate, be sustainable operationally, which means that if we don't get donations, maybe we won't be able to serve as many students, but we will continue working.
Now, your third question was about how do you continue doing it, and the answer there is actually... I think it's partially personality. I never give up. I'm like, you know, the energizer bunny. But more than that, I guess that it's the belief in the mission and the belief that if you will continue doing, it will eventually work. And it does.
It's yes and no. And let me explain. First of all, if you compare our degree students. Refugees are all free, totally free. They do better than the other students. So the fact that they don't pay does not mean that they are not serious. However, that's after they became degree-seeking. When we started, and we evolved a long time.
At the beginning, we let everyone in, and we didn't even ask them for their English, which was really stupid, because if you can't speak English, you can't study with us. So we evolved, and we put bars, and we put, actually. But one of the things that we did, we introduced two foundation courses.
So when you come to us, as long as you speak English and you have a high school diploma, you're welcome to start. And when you start with us, we ask you to take two courses. It's two academic courses. One course is online strategies, which teach you how you study online, how to write an essay, etc. The second one is the field of your choice.
And we only teach business administration, computer science and health science undergraduate, as well as MBA, master in education and master in IT, MA level courses. So you come to us and we say, take two courses. See if you like it. See if you have the motivation. See if you like our pedagogy. If you have the discipline. If you have all this, continue. Show us that you meet our standards.
You pass the courses. You get credit for them and continue with us. You don't pass the courses, sorry, you can't continue with us. But we lose over half of the students in these two courses for the very reason that you mentioned, because a lot of students say, oh, it's tuition free. I'll come in and get a degree by mail.
Or we tell the students every single course that you take requires 20 hours a week. And the human nature is to say, well, 20 hours a week is for him. I can do it in an hour a week. Well, one hour goes by and you're gone. You can do it in one hour a week. And then, you know, it's the discipline of spending every night. You're sitting in front of the computer and you're by yourself.
It's not that you sit with your peers.
So it's really hard. So a lot of people simply cannot make it. So it's a screening that only the serious students come. After they come and after they pass, we have amazing results and they continue and graduate. But yeah.
I think that you shouldn't start any project if you don't understand the subject matter or you have someone who understands it. Because if you want to produce a new car and you have no idea what it means to produce a car, most likely you're going to fail unless you have people around you that will help you. So this is one very important thing. Second, you need pretty much to know the process.
and plan for it, what it takes, what are the stages, how much money you need in order to do it. So you need to know all the details before you launch it. I think that you must have experts on your side, unless you know it, experts on your side in every aspect. I'm not a financial person. I will never be one. But I always had great financial people next to me to tell me, don't do that.
You don't have the money to do it or you need to do it this way or the other way. You need to think about what other parts you need that you don't have such as marketing. Do you know how to market? And you need to know how much it will cost you to market because otherwise it won't work. So I think that it takes a lot of learning before you go into it. Then you need to try to test your product
As soon as you can get feedback all the time, get feedback, what you do. You know, when we started, when I, we started the university, we thought that we are going to develop our learning management system by ourselves. Even though I had a university and we never developed it by ourselves. You bought one, you rent one actually. And it took me.
A few months that a friend of mine who is actually understand much more than I am in technology and in universities technology said, you're crazy. You will never be able to make it this way because it's so costly. You know, that's not your business.
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