Shai Reshef - Biography

Shai Reshef is an educational entrepreneur. He is the founder and president of University of the People.

1 Education and Career
2 University of the People
3 Honors and awards
4 Personal life
5 External links

Education and Career

Reshef holds an MA from the University of Michigan in Chinese Politics.

From 1989 to 2005, Reshef served as Chief Executive Officer and then Chairman of the Kidum Group — a for-profit educational services company. Reshef joined Kidum in 1989 when it was a single product company with revenues of $100,000. Under his leadership, Kidum grew to become a company with annual revenues in excess of $25 million, with over 1,000 employees and 50,000 students a year. In 2005, he sold the company to Kaplan, Inc., one of the world’s largest education companies and a subsidiary of the Washington Post.

Between 2001 and 2004, while continuing as the chairman of Kidum, Reshef lived in the Netherlands where he chaired KIT eLearning, a subsidiary of Kidum. KIT is the eLearning partner of the University of Liverpool and the first online university outside of the United States. KIT provides MBA and M.Sc. degrees in IT. In 2004, the company was acquired by Laureate Online Education.

University of the People

In January 2009, Reshef unveiled University of the People, a non-profit, tuition-free, online academic institution that aims to revolutionize higher education by making college-level studies accessible to students worldwide. In 2011, University of the People signed a collaboration agreement with New York University to accept transfer students and Hewlett Packard for student internship opportunities.

Honors and awards

Reshef has spoken internationally at conferences including DLD: Digital, Life, Design in Munich, Hacking Education in New York, the World Economic Forum on the Middle East in Amman, Jordan, UNDESA-GAID Global Forum in Monterrey, Mexico, and Fourth University Industry Council Symposium in Kolkata, India. He has also lectured at Yale Law School as part of the ISP Speaker series.

In 2009, Reshef was named one of Fast Company magazine’s “100 Most Creative People in Business and selected by OneWorld as one of its “People of 2009”. In September 2010, Reshef was selected as a Huffington Post Game Changer, a title awarded to 100 global innovators whose work is changing the world. Additionally, in September 2010, he was awarded a fellowship by Ashoka and welcomed to the United Nations Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development (GAID) as a High-level Adviser.

During the summer of 2010, Reshef participated in the Science Foo Camp (SciFoo), an informal discussion, demonstration and debate with over 200 of the leading scientists, technologists, writers and other thought-leaders and was granted membership to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). Reshef was also given the honor of ringing the closing bell at the Nasdaq in New York City.