Shai Reshef, president and founder of the online, tuition-free University of the People, and Arizona State professor and researcher Michelene Chi, who has developed a framework to improve how students learn, are the 2023 winners of The Yidan Prize, the biggest award in education.
Reshef and Chi will each receive 15 million Hong Kong dollars from The Hong Kong-based Yidan Prize Foundation, as well as another 15 million Hong Kong dollars in unrestricted funds to further their work, the foundation announced Wednesday.
Reshef and Chi will join the other laureates at a summit in December to receive their awards and discuss potential advancements in education. Currently, UoPeople only teaches students in English and, more recently, Arabic, due to the large number of Syrian refugees enrolled. Reshef wants to use the financial support from the prize to offer classes in Spanish to help Venezuelan refugees, as well as offer job placement services for graduates. He also hopes the prize will encourage others to replicate the UoPeople model, where students pay no tuition, only a reduced fee for each class that they take toward their degrees.
Through her research, Chi has identified many concrete changes teachers can make to increase their students’ understanding of their lessons. Some are as simple as changing the words used in assignments – “explain” or “justify” are better than “review” or “match” – or taking breaks in a lecture every few minutes so students can reset their attention on a topic.