Nearly everyone agrees the online education is going to be huge, but ask what exactly that means in practice and how that will impact students, and the bickering begins. Except about one thing. As Pulitzer Prize winner Tina Rosenberg recently wrote in the New York Times, “online education is highly controversial. But the flipped classroom is a strategy that nearly everyone agrees on.”
几乎所有人都同意在线教育有燎原之势，但如果问在线教育在具体教育实践中的作用、乃至对学生的影响，人们的意见分歧就出现了。正如普利策奖得主蒂娜-罗森堡最近在纽约时报中所言，“在线教育含有极大的争议性，但翻转课堂是大家都赞同的策略。”

What is it? A model where “students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call ‘homework’ in class,” Rosenberg explains, before going on to report that though research is still in its early stages, “many people are holding it up as a potential model of how to use technology to humanize the classroom.”
翻转课堂是什么？罗森堡称，这是一种学生们在家里看老师们讲课，在课堂上完成我们一贯称之为“家庭作业”的功课的模式。罗森堡接着就相关问题进行了概括，指出虽然相关研究还在早期阶段，“许多人十分支持这种教育模式，认为这一模式极具潜力，体现着科技使教室人性化的效果。”

Among them is Sumner Murphy, the 22-year-old founder of London-based startup Mobento. Oh, and the investors who gaved him £1.1 million this summer to pursue his vision of education technology for a flipped classroom future in one of Britain’s biggest ever seed funding rounds.
萨姆-纳墨菲是这种新型教育模式的支持者之一。这个22岁的青年在伦敦创建了马本多创业公司。为他的公司投资了110万英镑，帮助他实现未来教育技术支持下的翻转课堂模式的投资者是伦敦最大的种子基金提供者之一，这位投资者同样是新型教育模式的支持者。

What exactly is Mobento offering? A public library of curated educational videos and the ability to search within them for specific phrases. The service is free to the public, while schools can pay for accounts which allow them to create and assign courses and get metrics charting students’ progress.
马本多公司可以向用户提供什么呢？一个收集有大量组织化的课程视频的公共图书馆，用户可以查找自己需要的门类。这一电子图书馆服务对公众免费开放，学校可以付费购买使用账号，从而创建和上传课程视频，查看学生学习进度数据等等。

But the actual tech, Sumner feels, is only part of a larger vision for a radical shift in education. “The educational system, whether it’s in the U.S. or Europe, definitely needs some revamping because it hasn’t really changed much in the last 100 years,” he said in an interview, adding that “video is a really great way of getting students to be engaged and to be interested in what they’re studying at school.”
但是萨姆认为，技术支持只是教育发展的激进转折这一宏观视域下的一个小部分。他在一次采访中说，“教育体系，无论是美国还是欧洲的教育体系，都需要进行确实改进，最近一百年以来教育系统几乎没有变化。”他又补充道，“教育视频是一种增加学生互动性的极好的教学方法，这能使他们对课堂知识产生兴趣。”

It’s also more personalized to students’ individual ability levels. “If you’re sitting in a classroom and your teacher gives you a lecture, it’s a one-off deal. If you don’t understand it, you’re going to be left behind, and if you’re a really smart student, you’re going to be bored in class,” Murphy says. By moving lectures to video — and thereby adding the benefits of pause, fast forward and rewind — students can learn at their own pace.
在线教育还可以适应学生个性化的能力增长需要。“当你坐在教室里，听着老师上课，这是一种一次性的教育模式。如果你不理解教学内容，你的学习进度就拖后了。如果你是一个特别聪明的学生，你会觉得课堂知识十分乏味，” 纳墨菲说。通过将课程转化为视频——这样一来还加上了可以暂停、快进、后退等等便利——学生可以以自己的节奏来学习。”

Such a radical shift in teaching style comes with changes that Murphy seems quite comfortable with but which may raise eyebrows in others. Take the idea that, with Mobento’s search function, students can skip straight to the exact content they need. Could that be seen as exacerbating our tech-enabled inability to focus or deprive students of mind-expanding context or serendipitous learning? Murphy shrugs off the suggestion, calling the ability to quickly find only the exact content you need a “win-win.”
对教育模式剧烈变革引起的变化，纳墨菲的态度是欣然接受，而另一些人则可能惊恐不已。例如，在马本多电子图书馆的服务功能之下，学生们可以跳过课程进度，直接学习他们想学的内容。这会不会使我们在信息技术下出现的注意力涣散的情况加剧，剥夺学生学习发散性的学习内容，以及温故知新的机会呢？对这种可能弊端，纳墨菲只是耸耸肩膀，他称，快速找到自己需要的学习内容是一种构成双赢的学习能力。

Still, given the magnitude of interest in the flipped classroom idea as measured by pounds invested in Mobento, it’s clearly an idea worth watching not just for those interested in educational reform, but also those interested in the business of education.
无论如何，根据马本多公司那些自豪的投资者们的考量，翻转课堂的理念具有巨大的利益。不仅对那些关注教育改革的人，也对那些关注教育产业的人来说，这一理念都是值得看好的。