Many people who laud recent online open-education initiatives by Udacity and Coursera may not realize that University of the People (UoPeople) has already developed a similar delivery platform for many people in underdeveloped nations. UoPeople uses open courseware to provide “tuition-free online education” to the world. Recent events, including NYU’s Arts and Sciences Dean Dalton Conley joining the administration as Dean of Arts and Sciences, give UoPeople the potential to become an unexpected player in the open-university market.

Israeli entrepreneur Shai Reshef launched UoPeople in early 2009, with only 180 students from 49 countries who were interested in receiving Associate or Bachelor degrees in two offered majors: Business Administration and Computer Science. Since then, UoPeople has grown to more than 1,300 students from more than 100 countries, despite the fact that UoPeople has yet to become accredited, or that many of the its faculty and administrators work on an entirely volunteer basis. The students are charged a nominal application-processing fee, the price of which varies by the student's country of origin, and UoPeople is currently considering a model that would charge students to take examinations.

UoPeople has already developed strategic partnerships with NYU and Yale University, as well as with Hewlett-Packard, and places an emphasis on global education that can reach the developing world by excluding audio and video from its lessons and ensuring that all of its coursework can be accessed without a broadband connection.

Conley has announced he will dedicate his sabbatical to expanding and promoting UoPeople, and he envisions extending the curriculum to include programs in healthcare and education, as these disciplines cultivate some of the most in-demand skills in developing nations. Conly also expressed interest in working to secure accreditation for the school and in developing a way to allow UoPeople to transfer credit to NYU, particularly to its Abu Dhabi campus. With these advancements, he hopes that enrollment will jump sharply. Conley is not the only one who recognizes the value of the mission of UoPeople; The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently awarded half a million dollars to help secure its accreditation.

The most profound potential impact of UoPeople, however, is that if it succeeds in obtaining accreditation in the United States, it could be the first institution to offer an entirely free online degree program, a direction that other online open-education initiatives may be heading toward. While it is impossible to anticipate the future UoPeople, it is not impossible that it will become a much more visible player in the open courseware movement of the future.