Teenage applicants from as far afield as India and Mongolia are catching western colleges’ attention by taking “massive open online courses” designed for older students.
远在印度和蒙古的青少年申请人因参加“大型在线公开课”(mooc)而引起西方高校的注意。Mooc原本是为年龄较大的学生设计的。
Schoolchildren taking Mooc courses on their own initiative account for about 5 per cent of the 800,000 students at edX, the online venture founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
哈佛大学和麻省理工学院(MIT)共同创办的在线教育平台edX拥有80万名学生，其中自主参加Mooc课程的中学生约占5%。
Amol Bhave, a 17-year-old from Jabalpur, India, learnt last week that he had been accepted to MIT after scoring 97 per cent on edX’s circuits and electronics course. He received the good news on March 14 – or “pi day”, as he put it in a Skype conversation with the FT.
17岁的阿莫尔•巴韦(Amol Bhave)来自印度贾巴尔普尔市。上周他获悉，他在edX电路与电子学课程中的考试得分在前3%之列，因此被MIT录取。他与英国《金融时报》记者在Skype上聊天时表示，他在3月14日国际圆周率日(pi day)这天收到了这条好消息。
“I am like the first person in my city to get into MIT ever so I have become sort of pretty famous,” Mr Bhave said.
巴韦说：“好像我是我们市有史以来第一位进入MIT的，所以我相当有名了。”
“I was so motivated by how we were taught [by edX] that I decided maybe I belong at MIT after all.”
“EdX授课方式大大地激发了我的积极性，我觉得我就是MIT的一份子。”
Mr Bhave came to the attention of MIT faculty members after joining two students he met in the course’s discussion forum to create a follow-up course. “I really felt that the quality of education online was far, far better than [my] school,” he said. “It opened doors to me for getting into colleges such as MIT which I could never even have dreamt of getting into from my town.”
巴韦与课程论坛上认识的两名学生共同创建一项后续课程时引起了MIT教职员的注意。他表示：“我真心觉得在线教育的质量比我们学校好太多了。在线课程为进入MIT这样的学校打开了大门，否则我做梦都不敢奢望从我们这样的城市能有机会进入这种学校。”
In addition to the small but growing pool of precocious teenagers, edX president Anant Agarwal said about 45 per cent of Mooc students are college age and the remainder older “continuing learners”. He added that edX chose a non-profit model to help achieve its target of educating 1bn people around the world within 10 years.
EdX主席阿南特•阿加瓦尔(Anant Agarwal)表示，除了比例虽小但增长迅速的早慧少年，Mooc学生中有45%的人到了上大学的年龄，其他更加年长的是“继续学习者”。他补充道，edX采用非盈利模式来实现在10年内教授10亿人的目标。
Less than one-third of edX’s students come from the US, with the second-largest group from India. EdX, which has 55 staff and users in 192 countries, expects to reach 1m students by its first anniversary in May.
EdX学生中，不到三分之一来自美国，第二大群体来自印度。EdX拥有55名员工，用户遍及192个国家，到今年5月成立一周年的时候，注册学生预计将达100万人。
Critics of Moocs point to the low percentage of students completing online courses. Of 155,000 who took edX’s first circuits and electronics course, about 26,000 were “active learners” who clicked on exercises and just 7,200 passed.
批评Mooc的人士指出，学生完成课程的比例很低。在15.5万名参加edX初级电路与电子学课程的学生中，约有2.6万人是“活跃学习者”，会点击练习，其中只有7200人通过课程。
But Mr Bhave predicted that online education would have a significant impact in India and beyond . “Seeing experiments performed in front [of you] has another pleasure,” he said. “Also your degree at the end also has the name MIT on it. That is something.”
但巴韦预计，在线教育将在印度以及其他国家产生深远影响。他表示：“亲眼看到实验在你眼皮底下进行也是一种乐趣。而且最后你拿到的学位证上还印有MIT名字。这很了不起。”