2. 外语
  3. The following two excerpts are about Massive Open Online Courses ( MOOCs) , a new form of online education. From the excerpts, y

The following two excerpts are about Massive Open Online Courses ( MOOCs) , a new form of online education. From the excerpts, y

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问题    The following two excerpts are about Massive Open Online Courses ( MOOCs) , a new form of online education. From the excerpts, you can find that MOOCs have a wide application across schools but there have also been doubt and criticism.
   Write an article of NO LESS THAN 300 WORDS, in which you should;
   1.   summarize the different responses to MOOCs, and then
   2.   express your opinion towards MOOCs, especially whether MOOCs have more benefits than drawbacks.
   Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks.
   Write your article on ANSWER SHEET FOUR.
   Excerpt 1
                                    Advantages of MOOCs
   New research has borne out what four million learners worldwide have known for some time. Online education works—and, in many cases, it’s more effective than traditional learning environments.
   While the traditional academic world has had mixed reactions to the disruptive impact of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), a team of international researchers has produced strong evidence that MOOCs work at least as well as conventional approaches.
   An MIT-supported study shows that MOOCs can teach as least as effectively as traditional classroom-based courses. In addition, they benefit all learners, regardless of the level of preparation or knowledge they begin with.
   It’s two years since The New York Times coined the term "the year of the MOOC" , and in that time, many traditional universities have embraced open, online learning while others have tended to bury their heads in the sand or to discredit the MOOC movement.
   Now, however, the benefits of MOOCs appear to have been robustly tested and, for the first time, confirmed. The findings were published in September in the International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, a paper by David Pritchard, MIT’s professor of Physics, along with three other researchers at MIT and one each from Harvard University and China’s Tsinghua University.
   After thorough before-and-after testing of students studying online, and similar testing of those taking the same class in its traditional form, Pritchard and his team found that " the amount learned is somewhat greater than in the traditional lecture-based course".
   A second, more surprising finding, Dr. Pritchard says, is that those who were least prepared, as shown by their scores on pretests, learn as well as everybody else. That is, the amount of improvement seen is no different for skillful people in the class—including experienced teachers—or students who were badly prepared. "They all showed the same level of increase. This actually is a case where a rising tide lifts all boats. "
   Excerpt 2
                                  The Dark Side of MOOCs
   There are legitimate concerns surfacing about MOOCs as their popularity spreads far and wide. One of the main concerns is student engagement. Limited data exists on MOOCs, but of the information available, pass rates have been low and dropout rates have been high. This is obviously a concern and a thorn in the side of the MOOC community. The online news site recently featured an interview with Coursera co-founder Daphne Roller, in which she was asked about "participation, completion and dropout rates of this online population. "
   This is what we see: Enrolling is easy. It’s a matter of just clicking a button, and it’s free. As the course really starts, only about 70% of students show up. Of the ones who show up, we see a bifurcation of the population. There are students who come in and they are primarily there to watch the videos. Of those who start watching videos, about 30% to 40% watch the course to its completion, with a fairly constant drop off rate week-on-week as students get busy.
   Then there is the second population: These are students who really do intend to take the course for real. We gauge that by seeing who submits the first assignment. If you submit the first assignment, you probably intend to take the class for real. The retention rate for this population is comparable; About 30% who start the first assignment will complete the last one.
   In terms of what you might traditionally call "retention"—that would be the number of students who submit the final assignment. In those terms, we have a retention rate of 7% to 9% , depending on the course. But that’s really the wrong way of looking at it because many of these students never really intended to seriously take the class in the first place.
选项
答案 MOOCs: A New Education Style to Ponder Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), no longer a popped-up idea but widely applauded—seem revolutionary and now researchers, through reliable studies, have verified their benefits over traditional teaching and learning. However, other researchers get surprisingly different findings when " participation, completion and dropout rates of this online population" are concerned. The popularity of MOOCs, to a large extent, illustrates the reality that the virtual world, especially in developed countries, has had greatly impacted and penetrated into people’s life. Fragmented learning is not a strange concept to people nowadays and MOOCs cater to people who are much more accustomed to utilizing subway time or the waiting hours of airport departure. Moreover, some of the most popular MOOCs cover topics that are applied to nearly every industry and provide people with courses they are interested in and dependent upon. Especially, if that industry is a must-have that they are considering moving into, MOOCs’ convenience is unprecedented. Cost reduction, lifelong learning and many other strengths gained through MOOCs are all welfare for many to achieve their goals. However, MOOCs have been rejected or moderately denied by many for various reasons. Firstly, traditional methods of higher education show remarkable persistence on their status quo and resistance to those newly-emerged models. College professors and teachers will encounter many difficulties in presenting MOOCs due to technology, capital, labor or other diversified limitations, not to mention the fact that the chief goal of many universities is to produce scientific papers to sustain their position in the global market. Secondly, whether MOOCs’ credentials will be accepted by the society, particularly the employers, remains an enigma. From what has been discussed above, though MOOCs are replacing partial functions of traditional education, they are, at the present time, more like a supplement instead of a substitute and their effects are still in the way of developing and perfecting.
解析    本题讨论的话题是当下流行的一种网络教学模式——慕课的利与弊。选段1介绍慕课的优点：慕课的授课形式和效果被广泛接受和认可。选段2则从慕课课程的参与度、课程完成程度和辍学率等方面阐述了慕课的缺点。本题写作的重点在于首先概括慕课的优缺点，其次就这种新兴的网络教学模式论述自己的观点。
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