Distance education 2.0 (3)

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Crashing the English club

English dominates MOOCs. For instance, 414 out of the 458 courses listed on Coursera are in English. Many Chinese Web users find it difficult to follow courses with no Chinese transcripts. But there are volunteers and translation communities who are translating courses into Chinese.

The courses on edX and Coursera by the two top Chinese universities are all given in Chinese. Professor Yu from Tsinghua, who teaches Principles of Electric Circuits on edX, has his teaching assistants translate the course and add English subtitles. But most courses do not have English subtitles, although many professors post course introductions and updates bilingually.

Many teachers say they do not have the time and resources to give the course in English or have English subtitles just yet, nor is it a requisite.

But it's not just the Chinese-speaking population who are interested in taking these courses. In the discussion forum on Chen's edX course, quite a number of users are asking how to access the course in English.

On Tuesday, Coursera announced its cooperation with Chinese Internet company Netease so that mainland viewers could access the video lectures. EdX, which hosts most of its videos on YouTube, seems to have similar arrangements for the Chinese courses.

Transforming the classroom

Today many universities in China are already experimenting with new teaching methods such as "reversed classrooms" or "blended learning," in which students watch video lectures about the basics on their own time and go to class for discussions with the teacher.

Li Xiaoming's Coursera course People and Networks is based on an elective course he gives on campus. This semester, his students at Peking University are required to watch the videos on Coursera before coming in to classroom discussions. "In the future, MOOCs will become part of Peking University education," he said.

Professors say MOOCs help bring down the walls of the college campus so that their resources can be shared with society. It also encourages teachers to improve their teaching.

"To be able to reach tens of thousands of students, I think that's very fulfilling for a teacher," said Li. "I dream that someday when a course is released, 100,000 people from around the world would sign up. And even if only 10 percent finish the course, it would be a large number."

Such a dream is echoed by many teachers. Chen said he loves teaching and wants to be able to reach more students.

"Online education is the future; and it's important to join the party sooner rather than later," said Chen. "I think teachers also need to have this sense of crisis; you are in a way competing with all the other great teachers, and you need to be creative."

For example, both Chen from Peking University and Yu from Tsinghua offer a course on electric circuits, although they say the courses are different. But they are not only competing with each other. They are also competing against Circuits and Electronics, the first edX course given by Anant Agarwal, MIT professor and president of edX. It had over 150,000 registered students and was immensely popular.

"If you want to become the cream of the crop, you need to compete with the best of the best," said Yu.

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