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Can schools survive in the age of the web?
This November, the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation invested a million dollars in edX, the world’s largest online learning initiative. Founded by Harvard and MIT, edX boasts a growing number of “massively(в широком масштабе) open online courses” (MOOCs) aimed at bringing virtual versions of world-class higher education to hundreds of thousands of participants. By 2013, it will offer a selection of entirely free online classes from Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and the University of Texas.
A not-for-profit platform, edX is billed as “the future of online education: for anyone, anywhere, anytime”. The future, though, is already starting to look crowded. One notable rival is Udacity, another free provider of digital higher education whose existence(существование) was inspired by the enrolment of 160,000 students in its founders’ online Introduction to Higher Education Course at Stanford. Or you could plump for Coursera, which was launched shortly after Udacity and today boasts close to two million enrolments on courses from 33 leading universities. Other exemplars such as the Khan Academy, meanwhile, have delivered online instruction to tens of millions of willing autodidacts; not to mention(упоминать) the billion views recently chalked up by TED talks.
Online, the global appetite for learning is becoming a powerful force. As the author and digital guru Clay Shirky put it in a widely-debated recent blog post, education is being disrupted by “a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible.”
The web itself is old news, as are the brute(грубый) facts of online information‘s dominance; we’ve had Wikipedia for over a decade. What’s new is the increasingly(все более и более) trusting eyes we turn towards online media for something more fundamental: the skills, knowledge and instruction required to thrive in the modern world.
“The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement,” Shirky observes. Rather, it’s that “education can be unbundled.” Much like many other fields – from broadcasting and newspapers to games and shopping – technology promises not so much to replace older institutions as to break up the packages they once offered, providing particular parts of them at a scale and cost unmatchable by the old order.
whether you consider online education actual? whether it will help pupils? whether training becomes easier?
the world passes to a new step to the fields of education. it didn't suffice to schools.
