The Professors’ Big Stage By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

專欄作者

教育的未來在互聯網

托馬斯·弗里德曼 2013年03月09日

過去的兩天里，我參加了由麻省理工學院(MIT)和哈佛大學(Harvard)召開的一 次大會，主題是“在線學習和居家教育的未來”， 這個主題也可以這麼解讀：“如果我的孩子能從大規模在線公開課程完全免費地學到知識，大學為什麼還要收取每年5萬美元（約合31萬元人民幣）的學費？”
你可能認為，公開課革命是一種炒作，不過，在波士頓給我開車的司機不這麼認為。我的老朋友邁克爾·桑德爾(Michael Sandel)開車到洛根機場去接我，他在哈佛大學教授著名的蘇格拉底式的正義論，有1000名學生上課。這門課是MIT與哈佛大學聯手推出的在線學習平 台edX提供的第一門人文課程，它將於3月12日上線。當我和桑德爾在機場會面時，我看見他穿着一雙色彩非常鮮艷的運動鞋。

Josh Haner/The New York Times

托馬斯·弗里德曼

“你從哪兒弄的這雙鞋？”我問道。桑德爾解釋說，他最近去了韓國，在那裡，他的正義課程已經被翻譯成了韓語，在國家電視台播出。這門課讓他在當地成 了一個如此知名的人物， 以至於韓國人請他在一場職業棒球賽上投出儀式性的第一球，除此之外，他們還送了他這雙鮮艷的鞋。是的，一位哈佛的哲學教授被邀請在韓國棒球賽上投第一球， 因為許多人喜歡他啟發學生思考重大道德難題的方式。
桑德爾剛剛在首爾的一個露天劇場給1.4萬名聽眾授課，現場聽眾可以參與課程互動。他的在線正義講座配有中文字幕，在中文網站上的瀏覽量已經達到了 2000萬次以上，引起了《中國日報》(China Daily)的關注，說“桑德爾在中國受歡迎的程度，往往只有好萊塢電影明星和美國職業籃球聯賽(NBA)球員才能比得上。”
好吧，不是每位教授都能風靡全球受到熱捧，然而，在線公開課革命已經來臨，它是真實存在的，儘管它將經歷許多成長的陣痛。以下是我從這次大會上獲得的主要心得：
正如歷史學家沃爾特·拉塞爾·米德(Walter Russell Mead)所說，高等教育機構必須行動起來轉變模式，從注重花了多少時間學習轉變為注重實際學到了什麼。這是因為，這個世界越來越不在乎你知道什麼。所有 的知識都可以通過谷歌(Google)找到。這個世界只在乎你能利用自己的知識做什麼，而且只有這個是有價值的。所以，這個世界不會為你的化學得了C+而 給你報酬，因為那只能說明你的州立學院認為你化學及格了，並願意給你頒發一個文憑說明這一點。我們在向著一個更加註重能力的世界邁進，這個世界對你如何獲 取能力不那麼感興趣——不管你是通過在線課程、通過四年大學學習、或者是通過公司管理的課程獲取這種能力都無所謂——這個世界更多地要求你能證明，你掌握 了這些能力。
因此，我們必須超越當前的信息傳授模式——教授是“講台上的聖人”，學生做筆記，然後再進行膚淺的評估——進入另外一種制度，要求學生、並且賦予他 們能力在網上按自己的步伐掌握更多基礎知識，而教室則成了和教授討論的地方，對所學知識的運用，也可以通過實驗室里的實驗得到磨練。現在好像有一種強烈的 共識，認為這種將在線課程和以老師為主導的教室教學結合起來的“混合模式”是最理想的。去年秋天，聖何塞州立大學(San Jose State)使用了MIT電路與電子學的入門網絡課程和互動練習。學生在家裡觀看MIT的課程並完成作業，然後再來上課。課堂上，開始15分鐘用來向聖何 塞州立大學的教授提問，教授做出解答，剩下45分鐘用來解決問題，進行討論。初步數據顯示，這門課考試及格的學生人數比例從近60%增加到了大約90%。 而且，因為這門課是取得理工科學位的第一步，這就意味着，更多學生可能會繼續學習，將來取得該領域的學位，從事該領域的職業。
我們要求水管工和幼兒園教師取得相應的資質，但卻沒要求大學教師應該知道如何教書。現在不一樣了。在線公開課正在製造一種競爭，這種競爭將迫使每位教授改善自己的教學方法，否則便會在網上遇到競爭者。
說到底，住宿式學院和它所帶來的教師與學生、學生與學生互動的經歷仍然有巨大的價值。但為了今後的成功，大學必須在鼓勵更多這種獨特的學習經歷的同 時，結合科技手段，用更低的成本，以可衡量的方式提高教學的效果。什麼教育方式有效，我們還要有更多的研究，但原地不動不是出路。
哈佛大學商學院教授、顛覆性革新的專家克萊頓·克里斯汀森(Clayton M. Christensen)曾做過一個很有說服力的講座，說如今的傳統大學就像上世紀60年代的通用汽車公司(General Motors)。就在那之後，豐田(Toyota)利用技術上的突破性進步，由一個名不見經傳的企業，變成了超越通用汽車的行業巨頭。克里斯汀森指出，哈 佛大學商學院已經不再教會計入門知識了，因為楊百翰大學(Brigham Young University)一位教授的在線會計課程“非常好”，連哈佛大學的學生都聽那個課程。當傑出的東西變得可以輕易獲得，平淡無奇的東西就沒市場了。

翻譯：張薇、陳亦亭

The Professors’ Big Stage

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN March 09, 2013

 

I just spent the last two days at a great conference convened by M.I.T. and Harvard on “Online Learning and the Future of Residential Education” — a k a “How can colleges charge $50,000 a year if my kid can learn it all free from massive open online courses?”
You may think this MOOCs revolution is hyped, but my driver in Boston disagrees. You see, I was picked up at Logan Airport by my old friend Michael Sandel, who teaches the famous Socratic, 1,000-student “Justice” course at Harvard, which is launching March 12 as the first humanities offering on the M.I.T.-Harvard edX online learning platform. When he met me at the airport I saw he was wearing some very colorful sneakers.

“Where did you get those?” I asked. Well, Sandel explained, he had recently been in South Korea, where his Justice course has been translated into Korean and shown on national television. It has made him such a popular figure there that the Koreans asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a professional baseball game — and gave him the colored shoes to boot! Yes, a Harvard philosopher was asked to throw out the first pitch in Korea because so many fans enjoy the way he helps them think through big moral dilemmas.
Sandel had just lectured in Seoul in an outdoor amphitheater to 14,000 people, with audience participation. His online Justice lectures, with Chinese subtitles, have already had more than 20 million views on Chinese Web sites, which prompted The China Daily to note that “Sandel has the kind of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars and N.B.A. players.”
O.K., not every professor will develop a global following, but the MOOCs revolution, which will go through many growing pains, is here and is real. These were my key take-aways from the conference:
¶Institutions of higher learning must move, as the historian Walter Russell Mead puts it, from a model of “time served” to a model of “stuff learned.” Because increasingly the world does not care what you know. Everything is on Google. The world only cares, and will only pay for, what you can do with what you know. And therefore it will not pay for a C+ in chemistry, just because your state college considers that a passing grade and was willing to give you a diploma that says so. We’re moving to a more competency-based world where there will be less interest in how you acquired the competency — in an online course, at a four-year-college or in a company-administered class — and more demand to prove that you mastered the competency.
¶Therefore, we have to get beyond the current system of information and delivery — the professorial “sage on the stage” and students taking notes, followed by a superficial assessment, to one in which students are asked and empowered to master more basic material online at their own pace, and the classroom becomes a place where the application of that knowledge can be honed through lab experiments and discussions with the professor. There seemed to be a strong consensus that this “blended model” combining online lectures with a teacher-led classroom experience was the ideal. Last fall, San Jose State used the online lectures and interactive exercises of M.I.T.’s introductory online Circuits and Electronics course. Students would watch the M.I.T. lectures and do the exercises at home, and then come to class, where the first 15 minutes were reserved for questions and answers with the San Jose State professor, and the last 45 were devoted to problem solving and discussion. Preliminary numbers indicate that those passing the class went from nearly 60 percent to about 90 percent. And since this course was the first step to a degree in science and technology, it meant that many more students potentially moved on toward a degree and career in that field.
¶We demand that plumbers and kindergarten teachers be certified to do what they do, but there is no requirement that college professors know how to teach. No more. The world of MOOCs is creating a competition that will force every professor to improve his or her pedagogy or face an online competitor.
¶Bottom line: There is still huge value in the residential college experience and the teacher-student and student-student interactions it facilitates. But to thrive, universities will have to nurture even more of those unique experiences while blending in technology to improve education outcomes in measurable ways at lower costs. We still need more research on what works, but standing still is not an option.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and expert on disruptive innovation, gave a compelling talk about how much today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M. Christensen noted that Harvard Business School doesn’t teach entry-level accounting anymore, because there is a professor out at Brigham Young University whose online accounting course “is just so good” that Harvard students use that instead. When outstanding becomes so easily available, average is over.