高考英语阅读素材：MOOC大规模开放 在线教育炙手可热

　　The MOOC market has exploded. Not only are there a proliferation of courses, there are now a proliferation of MOOC platform providers and tools.

　　MOOC 大规模在线开放课程市场如今已是炙手可热，不仅在线课程的数量激增，在线教育平台供应商和在线教育技术工具的数量也在激增。

　　This month Coursera landed another $20M in funding, bringing their total investment to $63M (even more than edXs original $60M funding by MIT and Harvard). Why all the investment? Because this market opportunity is massive and building these online courses is expensive.

　　7月份Coursera公司融到了2000万美元的资金，公司总投资额达到6300万美元（比edX公司从麻省理工大学和哈佛大学获得的6000万美元首轮融资还多）。为什么Coursera能获得这么多的融资？因为这一市场机会巨大，而且创建在线课程的费用是很高的。

　　There are more than 2 billion potential learners around the world today, and more than 70% of these are unable to afford a college degree. And today a college degree is more important than ever: McKinsey believes college-educated workers will have a three-fold advantage in salaries and opportunities by 2020.

　　当今全球有超过20亿潜在的网络学习用户，其中超过70%的人无法支付大学学费。而现在大学文凭又具有空前的重要性：美国麦肯锡咨询公司认为，到2020年，具有大学文凭的职员在薪酬和升职机会等方面会比不具有大学文凭的职员多出三倍的优势。

　　Adding to this hot market for college, there are hundreds of millions of post-secondary students and professionals who will flock to branded degree courses in a huge way. As the MOOC certification market matures these individuals will find online education more and more valuable every quarter.

　　对大学文凭的需求形成了一个充满活力的市场，不仅如此，还会有千百万的大专学生和教授前来购买名牌大学的高级课程和高级学位。随着大规模在线开放课程学位获得机制的不断成熟，这些学员会越来越意识到在线教育的价值。

　　While many people have commented on the low completion rates for MOOCs and even Sebastian Thrun of Udacity is unhappy with his coursess impact, this space is poised to grow very rapidly. Even Google has put their engineering team onto the edX platform.

　　许多人认为大规模在线开放课程的完成率很低，就连在Udacity公司供职的巴斯蒂安特龙都抱怨自己学习的网络课程对自己造成了不好的影响。尽管如此，在线教育仍然在迅速壮大，不断开拓自身空间。就连谷歌公司都开始要求自己门下的工程师学习edX平台上的课程。

　　And new MOOCs are popping up. San Francisco-based NovoEd is now offering courses directly from Stanford Business School. Berlin-based iversity is offering a wide range of courses from European educational institutions.

　　新的在线学习平台还在不断涌现。位于旧金山的NovoEd公司向学员们直接提供斯坦福商学院的课程。位于柏林的iversity公司向学员们提供来自数家欧洲教育机构的一系列课程。

　　While this is still a young market, the demand is there and we expect it to grow exponentially in the coming years.

　　虽然这一市场还很年轻，但需求已经十分可观。我们期待在未来数年里这一市场还会成倍的增长壮大。

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