网络公开课提供免费教育.docVIP

网络公开课提供免费教育 This is the VOA Special English Education Report. ? A class with tens or even hundreds of thousands of students might sound like a teachers bad dream. But a big idea in higher education these days is the massive open online course, or MOOC. ? Some universities offer free, non- credit MOOCs available to anyone in the world. Others charge for courses and provide credits. The idea is still developing. ? The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently started its first MOOC. The school plans to offer many free, non-credit courses through a project called MITx. ? So far, most massive open online courses are in computer science, technology, mechanics and engineering. For example, students around the world are taking a free course called Building a Computer Search Engine. Two computer scientists, Sebastian Thrun and David Evans, are offering this course through . ? Mr. Evans is on leave from the University of Virginia. Mr. Thrun is a Stanford research professor and a Google Fellow best known for his work on a driverless car. ? There are no education requirements for the course. The students watch short videos. Then, says Mr. Evans, they take informal, ungraded quizzes after the videos each week for six weeks. ? DAVID EVANS: Quizzes are part of the lecture to keep students engaged and keep them thinking, for students to be able to check that they understood what we covered. Those are not graded and students try those as often as they wish. ? They can repeatedly watch the videos and take the quizzes whenever they want. ? Students receive homework. They join online groups to exchange questions and answers about the course. ? The teachers hold virtual office hours to answer questions that the students have voted to send them. They also present their own questions and observations. ? The students take a final examination to show where they rate in the class Everyone who finishes the course receives a grade and proof of completion. Top students get letters documen