The courses are being offered through Coursera, an educational thechnology company that first began offering free, online education to a dozen Stanford engineering classes in 2008.
Andrew Ng, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford, cofounded Coursera along with (note 1) Daphne Koller, another Stanford professor.
Ng said Coursera partners with 33 universities form around the world and makes a few of its course available online free for a large audience. As of last month, around 1.7 million students from 196 countries had enrolled for (note 2) at least one course.
“I want to live in a world where everyone has access to hight-quality education,” Ng said. “Education is not just for the privileged (有特權的).
Ng, who grew up in Hong Kong and Singapore but left when he was eight, said he knew some students from relatively less developed countries, such as China and India, may not be able to afford higher education.
Coursera offers 199 courses spanning (包括) the humanities, medicine, biology, social sciences, mathematics, business, computer science and many others.
Most videos use English as the medium of instruction (note 3).
But some have Chinese, Russian and French subtitle (字幕) that are prepared by student volunteers. Each course takes four to 10 weeks to complete. Certificates are given to successful students. HKUST is the first university in Hong Kong to offer Coursera online programs.
Pong Ting-chuen, computer science and engineering department professor at HKUST, said online education allows students to form a global community (note 4).
(note 1) along with 與…在一起together with
e.g. Barak Obama gave his victory speech along with family in his hometown Chicago.
(note 2) enrolled for =參加
(note 3) medium of instruction=教學語言
(note 4) a global community=世界共同體
沒有留言:
張貼留言