Imagine what happens when students from India and Pakistan study together. They learn to know each other, to respect each other. Instead of being enemies outside of the class, they become friends. We believe that by doing so we make peace a bit closer.

Q. What about the instructors?

A. For our 1,500 students we have 2,900 volunteer professors who jumped on board to help our students — a ratio of about two professors for every student. I don’t think there are many universities with this ratio.

Q. What do students pay?

A. When they apply, students have to pay an application fee, which ranges from $10 to $50 depending on the gross domestic product of their country of residence. For example, the United States would be $50. So would the United Kingdom and Japan.

Q. What are some $10 countries?

A. South Sudan, Ethiopia, Nepal. If they don’t have it, we waive it. But starting in September we are also asking our students to pay for exams. While we waive 95 percent of the cost of higher education, we want the program to become financially sustainable. An exam costs us $100 to administer and grade. But if a student can’t afford that, he or she can go to our micro-scholarship portal.

Q. Explain the micro-scholarship portal.

A. We are the second largest university on Facebook after Harvard, which obviously means we should try harder, right? What we are trying to do there is to tell them, “Please help our students, some of them can’t even afford the $100 for an exam.” Let’s say a student needs $500. This will come from small amounts of $5 or $10 rather than a single donation. Also there will be a direct connection between the students and the donors.

Q. How does the teaching work?

A. When students sign up for a class they are put together with students from 20 or more different countries. They study together for 10 weeks. When they go into the “classroom,” the first thing that they see is the profile of their fellow students, which is very similar to a Facebook profile. Then they find the lecture notes for the week, the reading assignment for the week and the homework assignment. They also find the discussion question of the week.

The discussion question is the core of our studies. Let’s say the first student is Chinese. Just because the morning starts earlier in China, so he will go into the classroom, read the material, see the discussion question and post his own original contribution to the discussion. Let’s say that the second student is Indonesian and she does the same thing. But she decides to comment on what the Chinese student said.