103 學年度學測英文 第 50 題

MOOC, a massive open online course, aims at providing large-scale interactive participation and open access via the web. In addition to traditional course materials such as videos, readings, and problem sets, MOOCs provide interactive user forums that help build a community for the students, professors, and teaching assistants.

MOOCs first made waves in the fall of 2011, when Professor Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University opened his graduate-level artificial intelligence course up to any student anywhere, and 160,000 students in more than 190 countries signed up. This new breed of online classes is shaking up the higher education world in many ways. Since the courses can be taken by hundreds of thousands of students at the same time, the number of universities might decrease dramatically. Professor Thrun has even envisioned a future in which there will only need to be 10 universities in the world. Perhaps the most striking thing about MOOCs, many of which are being taught by professors at prestigious universities, is that they’re free. This is certainly good news for cash-strapped students.

There is a lot of excitement and fear surrounding MOOCs. While some say free online courses are a great way to increase the enrollment of minority students, others have said they will leave many students behind. Some critics have said that MOOCs promote an unrealistic one-size-fits-all model of higher education and that there is no replacement for true dialogues between professors and their students. After all, a brain is not a computer. We are not blank hard drives waiting to be filled with data. People learn from people they love and remember the things that arouse emotion. Some critics worry that online students will miss out on the social aspects of college.