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Now online provision is transforming higher education, giving the best univer

游客2025-01-30  50
问题    Now online provision is transforming higher education, giving the best universities a chance to widen their catch, opening new opportunities for the agile, and threatening doom for the slow and average. The roots are decades old. Britain’s Open University started teaching via radio and television in 1971. MIT and others have been posting lectures on the Internet for a decade.
   But the change in 2012 has been electrifying. Two start-ups, both spawned by Stanford University, are recruiting students at an astonishing rate for "massive open online courses" or MOOCs. In January, Sebastian Thrun, a computer-science professor there, announced the launch of Udacity. It started to offer courses the next month — a nanosecond by the standards of old-style university decision-making. In April, two of Mr. Thrun’s ex-colleagues launched a rival, Coursera. At first, it offered online courses from four universities. By August, it had signed up 1 million students, now boasting over 2 million. Harvard and MIT announced they would launch edX, a non-profit venture. Other schools have joined, too.
   One spur is economic and political pressure to improve productivity in higher education. The cost per student in the U.S. has risen at almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983. For universities beset by heavy debts, smaller taxpayer subsidies and a cyclical decline in enrollment, online courses mean better tuition, higher graduation rates and lower-cost degrees. New technology also gives the innovative a chance to shine against their rivals.
   MOOCs are more than good university lectures available online. The real innovation comes from integrating academic talks with interactive coursework, such as automated tests, quizzes and even games. Real-life lectures have no pause, rewind (or fast-forward) buttons; MOOCs let students learn at their own pace, typically with short, engaging videos. The cost of the courses can be spread over huge numbers of students. MOOCs enrich education for worldwide students, especially the cash-strapped, and those dissatisfied with what their own colleges are offering. But for others, especially in poor countries, online education opens the door to yearning for opportunities.
   Some of Europe’s best schools are determinedly unruffled. Oxford says that MOOCs "will not prompt it to change anything", adding that it "does not see them as revolutionary in anything other than scale". Cambridge even says it is "nonsense" to see MOOCs as a rival; it is "not in the business of online education". Such universities are likely to continue to attract the best (and richest) applicants who want personal tuition and the whiff of research in the air. For these places, MOOCs are chiefly a marketing opportunity.
   To compete head-on with established providers, MOOCs must not just teach but also provide credible qualifications. The vast majority of Coursera, Udacity and edX offerings do not provide a degree. This may be one reason for MOOCs’ high dropout rates. Another worry is that online tests are open to cheating and plagiarism. Peer grading even if honest, may be flawed. [br] Compared with real-life lectures, MOOCs are offered to______.
选项 A、allow students to pause during academic talks
B、encourage students to rewind the buttons to track the tapes
C、enable students to learn in their classrooms with videos
D、integrate academic talks with interactive coursework
答案 D
解析    细节识别。根据第四段“The real innovation comes from integrating academic talks with interactive coursework”可知，慕课真正的创新是将学术讨论融入互动性作业。选项A和B均是其中的细节，而选项C的classrooms是误导性表述，慕课完全可以在其他场所进行学习。【知识拓展】慕课通过网络将分布于世界各地的授课者和学习者通过某一个共同的话题或主题联系起来，包括每周一次的讲授、研讨问题以及阅读建议等。其中比较典型的特点是每门课都有频繁的小测验，有的还有期中和期末考试。考试通常由同学评分(比如一门课的每份试卷由同班的五位同学评分，取其平均数为最终分数)。有的课程免费，有的收费，费用由所有学生均摊。所以中国的慕课在大力推广，以期更多人参与。
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