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Rather than deploy the most sophisticated and expensive technology, UoPeople keeps it simple—everything happens asynchronously, in text only. As long as students can connect their laptops or mobile devices to a telecommunications network, somewhere, they can study and learn. For most of humanity, this is the only viable way to get access to higher education. When the university polled students about why they had enrolled, the top answer was, "What other choice do I have?"

The scale of the global population lacking access to higher education is gargantuan—Reshef puts it at 100 million people worldwide. It's outlandish to think that they'll get it through the construction of American-style colleges and universities—the most expensive model of higher education known to humankind, and getting more so every year. Low-cost, online higher-education tools are the future for most people

Undergraduates at the University of California at Berkeley can minor in global poverty, but Berkeley isn't using newly available online-learning tools to actually reduce global poverty by helping impoverished students earn college degrees.

Most elite American colleges are content to spend their vast resources on gilding their palaces of exclusivity. They worry that extending their reach might dilute their brand. Perhaps it might. Righteousness is easy; generosity is hard

Self-directed learning. A connectivist learner has to be fairly autonomous to be able to learn independently, away from educational institutions, and to be engaged in aggregating, relating, creating, and sharing activities.

Critical literacies

A major concern is that because people need to aggregate information and resources autonomously, either by (RSS) feeds or through the use of human filters, they require a high level of critical analysis skills to be able to do so effectively.

What type of structure might then aid learners in overcoming the aforementioned challenges? What can be done to engage learners in critical learning on an open network? Carroll, Kop, and Woodward (2008) see as the crux to engaging learners in an online environment the creation of a place where people feel comfortable, trusted, and valued. The task would be to move toward a space that aggregates content and to imagine it as a community, a place where dialogue happens, where people feel comfortable and where interactions and content can be easily accessed and engaged with, a place where the personal meets the social with the specific purpose of learning. The National Research Council of Canada’s Institute for Information Technology is currently engaged in the research and development of such a structure, a PLE named Plearn,