1. In the last year, MOOCs have gotten a tremendous amount of publicity. Last November, the New York Times decided that 2012 was “the Year of the MOOC,” and columnists like David Brooks and Thomas Friedman have proclaimed ad nausea that the MOOC “revolution” is a “tsunami” that will soon transform higher education. As a Time cover article on MOOCs put it — in a rhetorical flourish that has become a truly dead cliché — “College is Dead. Long Live College!”
2 . Where is the hype coming from? On the one hand, higher education is ripe for “disruption” — to use Clayton Christensen’s theory of “disruptive innovation” — because there is a real, systemic crisis in higher education, one that offers no apparent or immanent solution. It’s hard to imagine how the status quo can survive if you extend current trends forward into the future: how does higher education as we know it continue if tuition fees and student debt continue to skyrocket while state funding continues to plunge? At what point does the system simply break down? Something has to give.
3. At the same time, the speed at which an obscure form of non-credit-based online pedagogy has gone so massively mainstream demonstrates the level of investment that a variety of powerful people and institutions have made in it. The MOOC revolution, if it comes, will not be the result of a groundswell of dissatisfaction felicitously finding a technology that naturally solves problems, nor some version of the market’s invisible hand. It’s a tsunami powered by the interested speculation of interested parties in a particular industry. MOOCs are, and will be, big business, and the way that their makers see profitability at the end of the tunnel is what gives them their particular shape.
4 . After all, when the term itself was coined in 2008 — MOOC, for Massively Open Online Course — it described a rather different kind of project. Dave Cormier suggested the name for an experiment in open courseware that George Siemens and Stephen Downes were putting together at the University of Manitoba, a class of 25 students that was opened up to over 1,500 online participants. The tsunami that made land in 2012 bears almost no resemblance to that relatively small — and very differently organized — effort at a blended classroom.
For Cormier, Siemens, and Downes, the first MOOC was part of a long-running engagement with connectivist principles of education, the idea that we learn best when we learn collaboratively, in networks, because the process of learning is less about acquiring new knowledge “content” than about building the social and neural connections that will allow that knowledge to circulate, be used, and to grow.
1. 去年，“大规模在线开放课程”得到了广泛的宣传。《纽约时报》去年11月份时曾把2012年称为“大规模在线开放课程之年”。撰稿人大卫·布鲁克斯和托马斯·弗莱德曼反反复复直至令人作呕地称道大规模在线开放课程引发的“教育革命”是一场“海啸”，将在短时间内在高等教育中引起变革。正如《时代周刊》里的一篇封面文章所指出的——在这个修辞学蓬勃发展的时代，“大学已死，大学万岁！”已经真正地成为了一个毫无生命力的陈词滥调。
2. 炒作从何而来？一方面，高等教育运用克莱顿·克里斯坦森的“颠覆性创新”理论“中断”的时机已经成熟。由于高等教育存在一个真正的系统性危机，没有人能为此提出显而易见或内在的解决方案。很难想象如果你把当前的趋势向前延伸至未来，这一现状能否存在下去，即如果学费持续上涨，学生债务日渐加重，而国家用于教育的资金继续下调，那我们所知道的高等教育将如何继续？该体系将会在什么时候完全崩溃掉？不得不做点什么。 3
与此同时，一种没有良好信用做基础的网络教育学形式发展的如此迅猛而成为主流，揭露了种种享有权力的人与机构在此方面投资程度之高。大规模在线开放课程革命如果到来的话，将既不会是心怀不满的公众找寻解决问题的技术的结果，也不会是市场某种无形之手在起作用。这是一个特定产业中利益集团的投机行为引发的海啸。大规模在线开放课程现在是，将来也会成为大产业，它的创造者看到了它背后的巨大利润，而也正是如此也赋予这个课程具体的形式。 4
毕竟,在2008年，当MOOC这一术语问世时，大规模在线开放课程描述了一个截然不同的项目。戴夫·科米尔指的一种当时加拿大曼尼托巴大学的乔治•西门子和斯蒂芬·唐斯正在制作一种开放式课件的实验，一个针对25个学生的班级的课件却面向超过1500个在线的参与者开放。于2012年登陆的如海啸一样的大规模在线课程与相对小型，组织结构不同的混合课堂几乎没有相像之处。
对于科米尔,西门子和唐斯来说，首次大规模在线开放课程是在教育中“联结者原则”中的一部分。这个观念就是我们说的网络合作，因为学习的过程与其说是获取新知识的“内容”，不如说是构建社会和神经脉络，从而使知识能传播，运用以及扩展。
This first MOOC was anchored by what Dave Cormier has called “eventedness” — the fact that it was a project shared among participants, within a definable space and time — but its outcomes were to be fluid and open-ended by design. The goal was to create an educational process that would be as exploratory and creative as its participants chose to make it. More importantly, it was about building a sense of community investment in a particular project, a fundamentally socially-driven enterprise.
5. The MOOCs that emerged in 2012 look very different, starting with their central narratives of “disruption” and “un-bundling.” Instead of building networks, the neoliberal MOOC is driven by a desire to liberate and empower the individual, breaking apart actually-existing academic communities and refocusing on the individual’s acquisition of knowledge. The MOOCs being praised by utopian technologists in the New York Times appear to be the diametric opposite of what Siemens, Downes, and Cormier said they were trying to create, even if they deploy some of the same idealistic rhetoric.
Traditional courses seek to transfer content from expert to student in a lecture or seminar setting. The original MOOCs stemmed from a connectivist desire to decentralize and de-institutionalize the traditional model, creating fundamentally open and open-ended networks of circulation and collaboration.In contrast, the MOOCs which are now being developed by Silicon Valley startups Udacity and Coursera, as well as by non-profit initiatives like edX, aim to do exactly the same thing that traditional courses have always done — transfer course content from expert to student — only to do so massively more cheaply and on a much larger scale.
Far from de-institutionalizing eduation or making learning less hierarchical, some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world are treating the MOOC as a lifeline in troubled economic waters, leveraging “super-professors” to maintain their position of excellence atop the educational field, and even creating new hierarchical arrangements among universities. The edX initiative, for example, is the effort by universities like Harvard and MIT to market their own courses to other universities. Trading on the Harvard and MIT name, edX is creating new revenue streams on the backs of less prestigious institutions.
6. Coursera and Udacity MOOCs are not really “connectivist” in the sense by which Siemens and Downes meant the term. For the post-2012 MOOC, learning is to be a process that focuses on the individual learner, who acquires new knowledge or skills, and is individually responsible (and graded) on how well he or she puts that learning into practice. As a fully marketized commodity, this MOOC is only legible at the level of the individual.
首次大规模在线开放课程的登陆被戴夫·科米尔称之为“大事件”。事实上，它是一个在限定的空间和时间内有参与者共享的项目。但是由于设计的因素，其成果将会是流动的和开放的。此目标就是创建一个让参与者感觉具有探索性的和创造力的教育过程。更重要的是，它是建立一种在特定项目上，根本上由社会机制驱动的团体投资意识。 5.
源于“破坏”与“非捆绑”的中心思想，2012年出现的大规模在线开放课程看起来是相当不同的。新自由主义形式的大规模在线开放课程，不以构建网络为目的，而是要解放和赋予个体力量，将真正存在的学术社群分崩离析，重新聚焦于个人的知识获得。 由《纽约时代》具有乌托邦理想的技术专家推崇的大规模在线开放课程与西门子，唐斯和科米尔所创造的课程完全相反，即使他们都使用了相同的理想主义的华丽辞藻。传统课程寻求通过讲座或研讨会的形式将内容从专家传递给学生。而大规模在线开放课程起源于连接主义者集权分散以及传统模式的非制度化，从而创建根本上开放，无限制，循环协作的网络。与此相反，正由硅谷创业公司 Udacity 和 Coursera,以及由像EDX非营利性组织倡议开发的大规模在线开放课程，致力于与传统课程一样，即把课程内容由专家传递给学生，只是更广泛，更廉价，规模更大。与教育中的非制度化不同或者为了使教育不那么等级分明，世界上一些最具声望的高等教育机构将大规模在线开放课程看做是摆脱经济困境的救命稻草。他们借力于“超级教授”来保持在教育领域中的卓越地位，而这又重新形成了大学中的等级划分。例如，EDX就倡议像哈佛和麻省理工大学就可以将他们自己的课程推销给其他大学。以哈佛和麻省理工大学名声为交易，EDX在不那么著名的机构支持下创造了新的收入来源。 6
Coursera和Udacity的大规模在线开放课程，严格说来并不是西门子和唐斯赋予该术语的真正的“连接主义者”含义。对于2012年后的大规模在线开放课程，学习将会成为一个着重于个体学习的过程。个体学习者获得新的知识或技能，并针对个体的实践表现进行评价。作为一个完全市场化的商品，大规模在线开放课程只有在个体意义上才是清晰可辨和明确的。
7 Given these realities, I would suggest that MOOCs are simply a new way of maintaining the status quo, of re-institutionalizing higher education in an era of budget cuts, skyrocketing tuition, and unemployed college graduates burdened by student debt. If the MOOC began in the classroom as an experimental pedagogy, it has swiftly morphed into a process driven from the top down, imposed on faculty by university administrators, or even imposed on administrators by university boards of trustees and regents. For academic administrators and policymakers, the MOOC phenomenon is all about dollars and cents, about doing more of the same with less funding.
And while MOOC-boosters like to deride the “sage on the stage” model of education-delivery — as if crowded lecture halls are literally the only kind of classroom there is — most of the actually-existing MOOCs being marketed today are not much more than a massive and online version of that very same “sage on the stage” model.
Through edX, for example, San Jose State University is incorporating videos of lectures by Harvard professors into its own curriculum in an explicit attempt to build a model that can then be expanded throughout the California State University system, the largest public university system in the world. But that model is simply a massive expansion of the lecture-based content delivery that the MOOC boosters claim to despise. And what could be more hierarchical than a high prestige university like Harvard lecturing to a less prestigious institution like SJSU?
8. Indeed, for those of us in California, the “MOOCification” of public higher education looks more like a land-rush than a tsunami, a massive give-away of public assets to private corporate interests. San Jose State University is literally located within Silicon Valley, so it’s not surprising that it has taken the lead in building bridges between educational startups and public higher education, outsourcing some of its own teaching to edX on the one hand and partnering with Udacity to offer online courses on the other. But if California is where everything happens first, as we are so often told, then we should be watching very closely how this state’s government and Silicon Valley are using MOOC fever as a cover to privatize public higher education
There is currently a bill pending in the California legislature — SB520 — which will require California’s public universities to accept course credit from selected online course providers, in hopes of eventually outsourcing as much as 20 per cent of their curricula. Much of this outsourcing will likely go to for-profit online institutions, the sector of the education industry which consistently produces the worst results at the highest cost. Student retention in this sector is low, fees are high, and the quality of learning outcomes is poor
7 鉴于这些事实，我认为大规模在线开放课
程只是一种维持现状，在预算削减，学费飞涨， 承担学费债务重荷的大学毕业生面临失业的时代高等教育再制度化的新方式。如果大规模在线开放课程作为一种实验教学法，之前就开始应用于课堂上的话，它现已迅速演变成一个自上而下驱动的过程，并由大学行政人员强加给教师，又或者甚至由大学理事会及董事会强加给行政管理员的结果。对于学术管理人员和政策制定者来说，所有的大规模在线开放课程现象都是关于美元的（利益的驱动），旨在用更少的资金来做更多同样的事情。
尽管大规模在线开放课程的支持者喜欢嘲笑 “舞台上的圣人” 的教育传递模式———仿佛拥挤的演讲厅确实是唯一一种课堂的模式———大部分今天被市场化的大规模在线开放课程与“舞台上的圣人”的模式差不多。
例如，通过EDX，圣何塞州立大学正将哈佛教授们的讲座视频纳入到它自己的课程当中，并试图建立一个可以扩展至整个加州州立大学系统——世界上最大的公立大学教学系统——的教学模式。但这种模型正是大规模在线开放课程的支持者一直鄙视，以讲授为主来传递内容的大规模扩展。有什么能比一个像哈佛那样享有崇高威望的大学给一个不那么著名的机构如SJSU(San Jose State University) 讲学，更具有等级性？ 8
事实上，对于我们这些加州人来说，公立高等教育的“慕课化MOOCification”看起来更像是一个抢滩潮而不是海啸，一种将公共资产大量退让给私人公司的利益妥协。圣何塞州立大学设在硅谷，所以，它率先在教育公司和公立高等教育之间修建桥梁并不奇怪，它一方面外包自己对EDX的一些教学，另一方面与Udacity合作提供在线课程。但是，如果正如我们所知，加州事事先人一步的话，那么我们应该密切关注国家政府和硅谷如何利用人们对大规模在线开放课程的狂热来作掩护，从而使公立高等教育私有化。 目前加州立法机关有一个悬而未决的SB520法案，这个法案需要加州的公立大学接受来自所选的在线课程提供的学分，最后希望外包高达20%的课程。很多这种外包将可能会转向网上营利性机构，教育行业一直以来以最高的代价换取最糟糕的结果。这一领域留住学生的比率不是很高，但是费用却很高，学习成果也并不理想。
9 To put it as simply as possible, the California legislature proposes to solve a real systemic crisis — collapsing public resources, diminishing affordability, and falling completion rates in the state’s higher education system — by sending its students to MOOCs. To the bill’s sponsor, Darrel Steinberg, and to Governor Jerry Brown, MOOCs seem like a win-win solution to an intractable fiscal crisis.
On the one hand, students who are locked out of overenrolled core courses can complete their degrees by taking those classes with an online provider, possibly even at a lower cost to students and at no extra cost to the state. On the other hand, allowing Silicon Valley start-ups like Coursera and Udacity to offer courses for transfer credit in the California State and University of California systems will give those companies a legitimacy in the education marketplace that they have never had before.
10 As UCSB professor and higher education commentator Chris Newfield put it recently in a blog post, this bill — and the associated MOOC frenzy — is “a straight business play:”
MOOC momentum is being driven not by educational need or proven technological achievement but by a business lobby with connections and resources as good as Wall Street’s, and with a better social cause. The movement’s systematic exaggerations, the lack of concern for impacts on the public university ecosystem, the staged benevolence towards a hostile customer — all are hallmarks not of technical or pedagogical progress but of a carefully designed business strategy.
11 If this bill passes, the winners will be Silicon Valley and the austerity hawks in the California legislature: the former will have privileged access to the largest student market in the state, while the latter will be relieved of the financial burden of having to educate the state’s young people
12 To put it quite bluntly, MOOCs are a speculative bubble, a product being pumped up and overvalued by pro-business government support and a lot of hot air in the media. Like all speculative bubbles — especially those that originate in Silicon Valley — it will eventually burst. Columnists, politicians, university administrators, and educational entrepreneurs can all talk in such glowing terms about the onrushing future of higher education only because it hasn’t happened yet; the MOOC can still be all things to all people because it is, in the most literal sense of the word, a speculation about what it might someday become.
While students and professors invest their time and energy, Silicon Valley is betting that MOOCs will be the next big thing in higher education, and politicians like California Governor Jerry Brown are aggressively pushing the state’s public universities to incorporate MOOC’s into their curriculum, gambling that massive, open, and online courseware will be the solution to the state’s continual crisis in higher education funding.
9 简单地说，加州立法机关通过让学生参与
大规模在线开放课程，提出一个解决真正的系统危机——公共资源的崩溃，负担能力的降低，国家的高等教育体系中完成率的下降——的解决方案。对该法案的发起人达雷尔·斯坦伯格，以及州长杰里·布朗来说，大规模在线开放课程似乎是一个解决棘手财政危机的双赢方案。
一方面，由于过度参与核心课程而被困住的学生可以通过网络供应商提供的那些课程来完成他们的学位，那些课程甚至可能对学生来说是较低成本的，对国家来说是没有额外费用的；另一方面，允许硅谷的初创公司如Coursera和Udacity在加州和加利福尼亚大学体系中提供转学分课程，这将在教育市场上给予这些公司之前从未有过的合法性。 10
正如加州大学圣巴巴拉分校教授，高等教育评论员克里斯·新野最近发布的一篇博文所说的，这项法案和相关的对大规模在线开放课程的狂热都是“直接的商业运作”：
大规模在线开放课程势头不是由教育需求或已证实的技术成就推动的，而是由一个与华尔街几乎一样有着关系和财力的，具有较好社会动机的商业来推动的。该运动的系统性夸大，缺乏对公立大学的生态系统影响的关注，对一个充满敌意的客户表现的仁慈——所有的这些都不是技术或教学法进步的标志，而是精心设计的业务策略。 11
如果该法案通过，赢家将会是硅谷和加州立法机构中的紧缩鹰派：前者将优先获得在该州最大的学生市场，而后者将会因为缓解了教育年轻人所承担的财政负担感到欣慰。 12
直接地说，大规模在线开放课程是一个投机泡沫，一个由亲商的政府支持和媒体炒作而产生并高估的产品。像所有的投机泡沫一样——尤其是那些源自硅谷的投机泡沫——它终将会破灭。专栏作家，政治家，大学管理者和教育的企业家都在议论这些关于高等教育未来的热情洋溢的措辞，这只是因为它尚未发生;大规模在线开放课程仍然可以为所有人做所有事，因为从这个词的字面意义上说，它让我们思索未来变化的样子。而当学生和教授将自己的时间和精力投注于此的时候，硅谷打赌说大规模在线开放课程将会是高等教育中的下一个大事件，像加州州长杰里·布朗这样的政治家们都在积极推动该州的公立大学把大规模在线开放课程纳入到他们的课程中去，并确信巨大，开放和在线课件将成为解决该州高等教育经费持续危机的方案。
13 Ontario’s higher education system, as with many other jurisdictions around the world, shares many challenges with California: unsustainable student costs, declining public investment, and austerity-focused politicians. California is often held up as an example for Ontario to emulate. So, if the MOOC frenzy has not fully hit Canada yet, it is safe to bet that it will be there soon. Like California, Ontario may be tempted to take its chances on a speculative bubble, one that dismantles the public university and privileges private interests. It’s a gamble we can’t afford to lose.
(1891 words)
英译汉
A MOOC course structure seems to usually be centered on topics such as online learning, teaching practices, learning about connectivism, or other such related fields as education and e-learning.
Adapting the MOOC structure for some topic not related to the field of education itself would pose some challenges considering the participants would likely not be comprised mainly of educators or even people with an affinity for Distance Education technology and innovation.
As others have pointed out, the effectiveness of a MOOC structure is partially dependent on the subject matter; not all subjects lend themselves to this style of information presentation. However, some especially do. Language Learning might be ideal for this type of course design.
13 安大略省的高等教育体系，正如世界各地
的许多其他司法管辖区一样，与加州面临许多共同的挑战：学生成本的不可持续，公共投资的减少，以财政紧缩为重点的政客。加州经常被树立为榜样让安大略省效仿。因此，如果大规模在线开放课程狂潮还没有完全入侵加拿大的话，可以肯定的说，它很快就会出现在那。像加利福尼亚州一样，安大略省可能会倾向于抓住投机泡沫的机会，即一个取消公立大学和给予一些私人利益集团谋利的机会。这是一场我们输不起赌博。
慕课结构似乎经常以话题为中心，例如在线学习，教学实践，学习连接，或其他与学习和电子学习有关的领域。
把慕课结构运用到与教育无关的领域本身有一定的挑战，因为参与者可能并非教育者，甚至并非熟悉远程教育技术和创新的人。
正如其他人指出的，慕课结构的有效性部分依赖于教学话题；并不是所有内容都适合这种信息传递的方式。然而，有些特别适合。语言学习可说是理想类型。
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