2 . Five years later, he quitted his job to work full-time on Khan Academy(可汗学院). The 75-person team is now based in Mountain View. The lesson style hasn't changed much, but Khan Academy now, besides science and maths, includes videos by experts in the ________ , too.

Today, Khan Academy has 15 million students in 190 countries. The You Tube channel has over 500 million________ . Khan’s ________ for the future has been supported by everyone from Bill Gates to Barack Obama.

While Khan is perhaps YouTube's biggest ________ in the field of learning, the platform is filled with instructional videos. There are video tutorials(视频教程)for changing a light bulb, assembling baby buggies, or learning the guitar.

It’s easy to see the attraction: ________ puzzling over an instruction manual(说明书)written in 15 languages, you can just watch someone ________ you.

Watching a video isn't just quicker than reading a manual—according to Khan, it's making us ________ . He argues that, by giving us a ________ level of knowledge, they help us get more out of experts.

________ , traditional educational establishments are welcoming YouTube, too. Universities around the world are ________ with video-based learning through massive open online courses, or MOOCs. While there has been some________ over whether lectures online devalue(贬……值)universities, almost everyone agrees that video tutorials have a role to ________ in teaching.

Khan believes that by teaching basic concepts ahead of classroom time, videos ________ teachers to focus on individual students. And by ________ the data Khan Academy gathers on each student—where they ________ or re-watch a video—teachers can know how much their students understand. This, says Khan, is the future of education: “empowering personalization”.

A new study published today shows that e-learning is more popular than ever. According to researchers at Shanghai University, 57% of students now obtain degrees through e-learning, with only 43%    1    (get)their degrees by attending a traditional university. This year, 18 million students around the world decided to start e-learning courses from the comfort of their own homes.

We spoke to Zheng Tai, an eighteen-year-old student from Sichuan Province    2     started an e-learning course last month.

“After I finished high school, I knew I wanted to continue to study,” Zheng Tai told us. “I worked hard and managed    3    (get)good results in all of my exams. I really wanted to study economics at university, but I wasn’t sure    4    leaving home was a good idea. I felt bad about leaving my parents. My father suffers from a severe illness which    5    (cause)his muscles to stop working properly. He often needs help moving around. He also needs someone to cook his meals and give    6    his medicine at the right time each day. My mother is a teacher, so she cannot help him during the day. We    7    have hired someone to take care of him, but I just didn’t feel right leaving my father with a stranger.

My mum suggested I go to a university nearby and continue to live at home, but none of    8    universities close to my home town offer economics. Then my friend suggested I find out more about e-learning. I soon learnt that I could get a good degree    9     leaving home. I applied to the University of London, and they accepted me. I started an economics course with them four weeks ago.”

However,     10    Zheng Tai is now a student at the University of London, he has never been to the UK. In fact, he has never left Sichuan.

6 . It is becoming more apparent now that students do more online learning than they ever have before. There are plenty of ways that educators can use technology to create online lessons and deliver instructions remotely.

You may think that the only way to run an online class is synchronously through web conferences, in the same way that physical learning does—with all of the students and the teacher present at the same time. In most cases, that won’t be very practical, since the probability that all of the learners and the educator being all together with live, stable Internet connections is relatively low.

The most crucial thing to keep in mind is that online learning does not need to take place at the same time as online teaching. You create a course in your LMS (Learning Management System) to be a series of modules (模块). Then you ask your learners to take the modules one after another, because each builds on the last. Each module may be a video that you created regarding the content, accompanied by a PDF, some relevant documents and third-party links, etc. Learners can log into the virtual classroom whenever they want, even during the early hours of the morning, to access each module in the order you have designed. You can also lay out some essential rules for the course, like the frequency and types of assessments and more.

As far as I’m concerned, while most of the time online learning saves the learning cost and provides diverse studying materials and instructions from educators, allowing your learners the freedom to do their coursework according to their schedules is what makes online learning distinctive. It helps boost engagement, teach your learners how to plan for themselves and be responsible, and improve their overall lives.

9 . Taking online classes from far away

Faiqa, a 15-year-old freshman at a public high school, logs in to her all-remote classes each night from Pakistan in a time zone nine hours ahead. Max, who also attends school in the same state, has joined his Advanced Placement history class for about two months from Guayaquil, Ecuador.     1    . During the pandemic, almost nothing about school has been normal, so administrators and teachers have come up with a solution:     2    . Some students in immigrant communities are logging in to school from thousands of miles away.

It is unclear how widespread the practice is. But out-of-country logins have become increasingly common since late fall according to educators in the country.     3    , and others temporarily left their homeland to care for sick relatives. However, because of the pandemic, they all can’t come back home. Remote education is really useful for them.     4    . “We recognize that the challenges of the pandemic may have temporarily changed circumstances for our families, and our schools are delivering strong virtual instruction to those who have chosen to learn remotely,” Ms. Filson, the district’s spokeswoman, says in a statement.

Max says he is grateful that he is still able to log in to classes during the special period of time. “    5    ,” he says.

It used to be impossible to spend a long winter holiday. But now, though the winter vacation has been over, it’s still necessary     1     me to stay at home because of my illness. As people say, being left alone all day can drive a man crazy. A couple of weeks ago my parents invited a teacher     2    (give) me lessons online.

At first, I didn’t know how     3    (take) classes through the Internet. Now I have got used to my teacher and the situation. Before class I go online waiting for my teacher to come, for it is terribly rude     4     a student to come late. In each class, the teacher teaches me     5     to do and how to do it. After class I finish my homework.     6    (be) honest, although I study relatively hard, the result isn’t as good as in school. Yesterday I failed to pass the exam, which made my teacher very disappointed. However,     7    (attend) classes at home is a comfort for me.

    8     to go to school is unknown, as no one knows how long it will be before I completely recover. But I believe, now that the winter is over and the spring has come, the school day is not far away. I believe that I will treasure my time     9    (be) at school and work even harder. I also believe in the future I will become another Zhong Nanshan, who is surely     10    (shoulder) the responsibility of protecting people’s lives and health.