Online ‘classrooms’ break the MOOC language barrier

By Colleen Kimmett. China is the number one country worldwide in terms of growth potential for massive open online courses, or MOOCs. This is something the largest North American MOOC platforms know well, and the past year has seen a flurry of activity to capture this market. Tsinghua University became the first in mainland China to create online courses, available through the US-based platform edX since October – the same month that rival platform Coursera announced a partnership with National Taiwan University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. But the question of translation – how to make the selection of predominantly English-language courses accessible to a global audience – is a problem these industry pioneers are still grappling with. More...