Harvard and M.I.T. Offer Free Online Courses
In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.在这场为全世界众多学生提供大量新的学习机会的学术的“泰坦之战”的契机里，哈佛大学和麻省理工学院于周三宣布了他们之间的一项被称作“edX”的非盈利合作项目，来提供两所学校里的免费网络课程。
Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project, MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120, 000 students, some 10, 000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but not credit.
在麻省理工学院在十二月份发布的该校第一个开放性网络学习项目——“MITx”后，哈佛大学才加入了这项合作。MITx的第一门课程，集成电路与电子学，授课开始于3月份，已经有近12万的学生参与，其中的1万多学生已经通过了期中测试。完成了课程的这些学生，将获得一份技能掌握证书和相应的考核分数，但是没有官方的学分。与此相似，edX也将仅仅提供证书而部给予学分认证。
But Harvard and M.I.T. have a rival — they are not the only elite universities planning to offer free massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michiganannounced their partnership with a new commercial company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.
但是，哈佛大学和麻省理工学院的这项工作仍然还是存在着竞争的——他们并不是仅有的想大量提供开放性网络课程（或称作MOOCs）的精英大学。在这个月，斯坦福大学，普林斯顿大学，宾夕法尼亚大学和密西根大学也公布了他们之间与一个获得了1千6百万风险投资的新兴商业公司Coursera的合作项目。
Meanwhile, Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor who made headlines last fall when 160, 000 students signed up for his Artificial Intelligence course, has attracted more than 200, 000 students to the six courses offered at his new company, Udacity.
与此同时，斯坦福大学教授巴斯蒂安·特龙在其新运作的公司Udacity里开设的六门课程已经吸引了20万学生的报名。据悉，在上个秋季学期，特龙教授在斯坦福大学开设的人工智能课程吸引了16万学生的报名参加而引起过极大的轰动。
The technology for online education, with video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback and student-paced learning, is evolving so quickly that those in the new ventures say the offerings are still experimental.
网络教育的科技，包括视频课程片段，嵌入的小测试，及时的反馈，以及学生理解速度的学习。这些技术是如此迅速的融入课程以至于投资人将其称作是一次实验性的尝试。
“My guess is that what we end up doing five years from now will look very different from what we do now, ” said Provost Alan M. Garber of Harvard, who will be in charge of the university’s involvement.
负责edX项目中哈佛大学部分的哈佛大学教务长阿兰·加伯教授说道：“我猜想，如果我们从现在开始将这个项目停下来五年，和现在开始做这个项目将会产生天壤之别的结果。”
EdX, which is expected to offer its first five courses this fall, will be overseen by a nonprofit organization governed equally by the two universities, each of which has committed $30 million to the project. The first president of edX will be Anant Agarwal, director of M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who has led the development of the MITx platform. At Harvard, Dr. Garber will direct the effort, with Michael D. Smith, dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, working with faculty members to develop and deliver courses. Eventually, they said, other universities will join them in offering courses on the platform.
EdX项目预计将会在今年的秋季学期开设5门课程，这些课程将会被由两所学校各承诺投资3千万美元运作的非盈利组织所监理。edX项目的首届负责人为麻省理工学院计算机科学和人工智能实验室主任安娜特·艾格瓦教授，他此前曾直接领导设计搭建MITx项目平台。而项目的哈佛大学部分，则由加伯教授和该校人文及科学学院院长迈克尔·史密斯教授，带领其他教职员工开发和授予课程。值得一提的是，他们言及其他高校也将加入此平台为该项目呈现更多其他课程。
M.I.T. and Harvard officials said they would use the new online platform not just to build a global community of online learners, but also to research teaching methods and technologies.
麻省理工学院和哈佛大学官方声称，他们将不仅仅把这个全新的网络平台用于缔造一个全球网络学习者的资源共享社区，他们还将用此致力于教学方法和技术的研究。
Education experts say that while the new online classes offer opportunities for students and researchers, they pose some threat to low-ranked colleges.
教育专家认为，在这个“网络课程”为众多学生和研究者授课风靡全球时，他同时也给一些排名不前的高等院校的招生教学等带来了诸多的威胁。
“Projects like this can impact lives around the world, for the next billion students from China and India, ” said George Siemens, a MOOC pioneer who teaches at Athabasca University, a publicly supported online Canadian university. “But if I were president of a mid-tier university, I would be looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading university offers a free circuits course, it becomes a real question whether other universities need to develop a circuits course.”
“像这样的项目将能影响全球诸多人，譬如说来自中国和印度的数以亿计的学生”，执教于加拿大公立网络学校阿斯巴思佳大学的一位MOOCs领域的领军人物乔治·西蒙说道：“但是如果我是一位排名中层的大学的校长，我将从此因其而战战兢兢。比如说，如果一个排名靠前的精英大学开设一项免费的电路课程，那么其他学校到底应不应该投入开设电路课程将会成为一个非常实际的问题。”
The edX project will include not only engineering courses, in which computer grading is relatively simple, but also humanities courses, in which essays might be graded through crowd-sourcing, or assessed with natural-language software. Coursera will also offer free humanities courses in which grading will be done by peers.
edX项目将不仅仅包括工程课程（在这类课程中电脑评分相对容易），他同样也涵盖了人文课程（在这类课程里，课程论文将通过多人评分或者采取自然语言软件评分）。Coursera公司同样提供了一些免费的人文课程，这些课程的评分将交给同行审议。
In some ways, the new partnerships reprise the failed online education ventures of a decade ago. Columbia University introduced Fathom, a 2001 commercial venture that involved the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan and others. It lost money and folded in 2003. Yale, Princeton and Stanford collaborated on AllLearn, a nonprofit effort that collapsed in 2006.
在某种方式下，这个新兴的合作再次赞扬了十年前的那场失败的网络教育风险投资。2001年时，哥伦比亚大学引进了Fathom项目，参与了这个项目的风险投资还有芝加哥大学，密西根大学和其他高校。在2003年，该项目在损失了投资的同时以失败告终。而在2006年，由耶鲁大学，普林斯顿大学和斯坦福大学合作的非盈利网络教育AllLearn项目也同样以倒闭而结束。
Many education experts are more hopeful about the new enterprises.
对于这个新兴的企业，许多教育专家对此持乐观希望的态度。
“Online education is here to stay, and it’s only going to get better, ” said Lawrence S. Bacow, a past president of Tufts who is a member of the Harvard Corporation. Dr. Bacow, co-author of a new report on online learning, said it remained unclear how traditional universities would integrate the new technologies.
“网络教育将在这个项目中得到夯实，并且会越来越好，”塔夫兹大学前校长，哈佛大学董事会成员劳伦斯·巴寇说道。关于网络学习的一份报道的共同作者巴寇博士说道，传统大学将如何深入强化这项网络教育的新技术目前还是一个未知数。
“What faculty don’t want to do is just take something off the shelf that’s somebody else’s and teach it, any more than they would take a textbook, start on Page 1, and end with the last chapter, ” he said. “What’s still missing is an online platform that gives faculty the capacity to customize the content of their own highly interactive courses.”
“与其拿着一本教科书，从第一页开始，一直教到最后一章，教授们更加不愿意做的就是从别人的书架上拿下来一些东西来教学，”他说道，“但现在该项目一大缺失的则是一个能够让教授根据授课学生量身定制具有高度互动性的课程的网络平台。
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