UoPeople President to Discuss Future of Online Education at SXSW EDU Conference

PASADENA, CA (October 24, 2022) – University of the People President Shai Reshef has been selected to lead a session focused on making online higher education more affordable and accessible at the 2023 SXSW EDU Conference. The international conference, held from March 6-9, 2023 in Austin, Texas, features innovative leaders from academia, technology, government and business.

Past speakers at SXSW EDU include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, former US Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, television talk show host Oprah Winfrey, The New York Times’ columnist David Brooks, and Khan Academy founder Sal Khan.

“I am deeply honored to be selected to speak at the 2023 SXSW EDU conference,” said UoPeople President Shai Reshef. “This is one of the most prestigious educational conferences in the world and will allow me to share UoPeople’s innovative business model that provides affordable and accessible higher education opportunities to more than 126,000 students from over 200 countries with other academic leaders in the hope they will replicate our model in the future.”

After receiving more than 1,200 session proposals for the 2023 conference, submissions were narrowed down through community voting, SXSW EDU Advisory Board evaluation, and staff review. UoPeople’s proposal received more than 1,300 community votes and is being promoted by the conference as one of its featured sessions.

“Year after year, we challenged ourselves and the community to build a conference and festival that reflects the transformational issues that are critical to education,” said Greg Rosenbaum, Senior Director of SXSW EDU. “This year, we saw an incredible range of breadth and depth of formats and topics including equity, human rights, literacy, edtech efficacy, and more.”

SXSW EDU is a component of the South by Southwest family of conferences and festivals that has grown from 800 to over 8,000 registrants in the last decade.

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About University of the People

University of the People (UoPeople) is the Education Revolution. It is the first non-profit, tuition-free, American, accredited online university. Currently there are over 126,000 students from more than 200 countries and territories. Designed to open access to higher education globally, UoPeople helps qualified high school graduates overcome financial, geographic, political, and personal constraints keeping them from collegiate studies. The university offers associate and bachelor’s degree programs in business administration, computer science, and health science, as well as an MBA and M.Ed. program. Graduates of UoPeople can be found working at such companies as Deloitte, Amazon, Apple, Pfizer, Google, Microsoft and IBM. UoPeople collaborates with Harvard Business School Online, New York University, McGill University, and the University of Edinburgh and has been supported by foundations such as the Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation and Hewlett Foundation. Learn more at www.uopeople.edu.