Promoting online teaching
The Taipei City Government announced the availability of the Chinese Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) at cooc.tp.edu.tw/index.htm. In a statement, the city called for support for rural-area children and influences to Chinese-language education around the globe.
The MOOC’s popularity was frequently brought up at Stanford University. Sabastian Thrun and Peter Norvig opened their much-acclaimed artificial intelligence online that draws more than 160,000 students ages 10 to 70. Later on, the famous artificial intelligence guru, now the lead scientist at Baidu, Andrew Ng (吳恩達), and colleague Daphne Koller at Stanford founded Coursera (www.coursera.org). To compete, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University on the east coast also launched edX (www.edx.org).
My personal favorite, Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org), is a great source of knowledge for the entire family, specially for my eight-year-old twins. The no-fuss, straight-to-essence style with a smartly timed video does the job to ease curiosity most of time. It is a fantastic tool for working parents looking for English resources to teach early math and other disciplines to children and young adults.
The proliferation of the MOOC is also driven by Flip Education, where students watch teachers at night on an iPad with their pace set, then engage in exercise or discussion in the classroom with teachers the next day. It frees up time so teachers can attend to more individual needs.
Customized flip education is also called Maestro Flip Education. It addresses individual needs better and eliminates a few issues brought by MOOC.
A few challenges are learned with the growing use and commercialization of the MOOC. Completion or participation averaged 4 percent. Cheating at tests is another issue that has made schools hesitant to issue formal certificates of learning.
The MOOC cannot stand without being part of formal curriculum inclusion.
The MOOC has far-reaching implications for higher education that few people recognize. It is coming — teachers and administrative staff at schools are losing their jobs to MOOC over time. With the growing intelligence of MOOC, it can morph into adaptive learning systems, or education robots.
For the US, which uses education to attract global talent, MOOC can also weaken that magnetism to India, China and other densely populated areas.
For Taiwan, it is my sincere hope that the new online free sources do get used in remote school for better equality.
Daniel Li
Taipei
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