ONLINE learning is becoming increasingly popular, particularly among students who cannot access traditional places of higher education due to various constraints, including financial, geographical and political.
Higher education has been under the spotlight in SA following last year’s #feesmustfall protests.
According to University of the People (UoPeople), a US nonprofit online institution of higher education headquartered in Pasadena, an increasing number of South African students are seeking to enrol at the institution.
UoPeople offers tuition-free undergraduate degrees (associates and bachelors) in business administration, computer science and health studies, and it recently launched a tuition-free MBA degree.
The university has 3,500 enrolled students from 180 countries and 56 are currently enrolled in SA. The current student body is expected to double this year.
"There has been a significant growth in the numbers of students in SA who are in the pipeline — in the process of applying," Shai Reshef, UoPeople president and founder, said this week.
"There is no need for thousands of qualified high-school graduates in SA or anywhere in the world who will be left out of higher education to remain shut out. Online education can be provided at significantly less expense than traditional education and utilising it can mean the difference for millions of individuals to successfully attain education or remain shut out of education, as is the status quo."
He said that UoPeople had a high number of low-income, first-generation students who were achieving their dreams of a previously unattainable college education.
The university has formed partnerships with prestigious institutions such as Yale University for research, UC Berkeley and New York University (NYU). UoPeople recently announced a partnership with UC Berkeley, whereby UoPeople’s top associates degree graduates will be considered for transfer admission to Berkeley’s bachelors degree programmes. NYU also enables top-performing UoPeople students to transfer to NYU with a general scholarship.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.