经济学人2019.4.27/Online education

Online education

在线教育

Patient learning

耐心学习

SAN FRANCISCO

旧金山

A new kind of online school wants to teach nursing, and more

一种新型的在线学校想要教授护理课程以及之外的课程

“I have been this close to buying a nursing school.” This is not a sentence you expect to hear from a startup founder. Nursing seems a world away from the hightech whizziness of Silicon Valley. And, to use a venture-capital cliché, it does not scale easily. Austen Allred, boss of Lambda School, sees things differently. His two year-old firm matches labour supply and demand by providing fast, efficient training to potential employees. It offers five online courses that prepare candidates to write software at technology firms. Training nurses, more of which are sorely needed to care for America’s ageing population, is not an illogical next step—especially when many nursing schools have to turn people away.

“我就差这么一点点就能买下一所护理学校。这句话并不是你期望从创业者那里听到的。护理似乎很难与硅谷的高科技奇才扯上关系。而且，用风险资本的陈词滥调来说，这一行业不并不容易扩大规模。Lambda学校的校长奥斯丁·奥尔雷德对此有不同的看法。他成立两年的公司通过为潜在员工提供快速、有效的培训来满足劳动力需求市场。它提供五门在线课程，为求职者在科技公司编写软件做准备。培训护士，尤其是在需要大量的护士来照顾美国的老年人的背景下，并不是不合逻辑的一步棋，尤其是当许多护理学校不得不将人们拒之门外的时代背景下。

词汇

Whizziness/ whizzy +‎ -ness；whizzy/技术先进的，技术上创新的，高技术的；

Cliché/[ 'kliːʃeɪ] 陈词滥调，

Sorely/疼痛地；非常；剧烈地

Instead of responding to the threat of joblessness posed by automation with a universal basic income, Mr Allred wants to help people to switch jobs faster. Unlike most online courses, Lambda does not charge students up front to attend (though admissions are competitive) and online tuition is live and interactive, not recorded. Full-time students attend for nine months, Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm San Francisco time. Latecomers risk falling behind. In most recent classes, 85% of students who began a course finished it.

奥尔雷德希望帮助人们更快地转换工作，而不是用全民基本收入（改善）来应对自动化带来的失业威胁。与大多数在线课程不同，Lambda不收取学生的学费(尽管入学竞争激烈)，而且在线学费是实时互动的，没有记录。全日制学生学习九个月，周一至周五，旧金山时间上午8点至下午5点。迟到者有落后的风险。在最近的课程中，85%的学生在接触课程后顺利成了课程。

The school only starts getting paid back for its services after its students have landed a job which pays them more than $50,000 a year, something Lambda expends significant energy to help them do. Around 70% of those enrolled do so within six months of graduation. Lambda then gets a cut of about a sixth of their income for the next two years, until they have paid about $30,000. (Or they can pay $20,000 up front.)

学校只有在学生找到一份年薪超过5万美元的工作后才会开始收回服务费用，Lambda为此花费了大量精力。大约70%的学生在毕业后6个月内完成了学业。然后Lambda在接下来的两年里从他们收入的六分之一中抽取，直到他们支付了大约3万美元。(或者他们可以预付2万美元。)

The firm devotes about a third of its time and resources to finding jobs for its graduates, an unusually high share. Another third goes to recruiting students and the rest to teaching. Courses are created with employers’ requirements in mind. For its web-development programme, the list given to Lambda by companies runs to 280 items. Unlike coding, nursing cannot be taught entirely over the internet, so Lambda wants to co-operate with nursing schools across America that could provide the necessary hands-on instruction.

该公司将三分之一的时间和资源用于为毕业生找工作，这一比例高得异乎寻常。另外三分之一用于招生，其余用于教学。课程是根据雇主的要求设计的。对于它的网络开发项目，公司给Lambda的列表有280个项目。与编程不同，护理学科不能完全在互联网上教授，因此Lambda希望与全美的护理学校合作，提供必要的实践教学。

After nursing, Lambda plans to work its way down the list of professions with the biggest job shortages. It is also examining the problem from the other side, identifying available jobs that require skills akin to those of victims of automation—truckers displaced by self-driving lorries or callcentre workers replaced by robocalls.

在处理完护理学学院培训问题后，Lambda计划在就业短缺最严重的职业名单上继续开拓。它还在从另一个方面研究这个问题，找出需要类似于自动驾驶卡车司机或呼叫中心工作人员技能的工作，这些人被自动驾驶卡车取代，呼叫中心工作人员被机器人电话取代。

词汇

Akin/类似的；同类的

Lambda’s quirks set it apart in Silicon Valley, but Mr Allred is not the first to recognise the value of work-focused education and training. Germany is famed for its widespread vocational training and apprenticeships. Closer to California, the University of Waterloo, a technologyoriented Canadian institution, has had gainful employment within the field of study as one of its core goals since it was founded 62 years ago. Students seeking an internship can enroll in a special scheme which matches them with firms. Norah McRae, who runs the programme, says that most universities spend little time finding work for the graduates, or teaching the skills they need to prosper in the job market. Too often students are treated as cash cows to be milked for research funding.

Lambda的怪癖让它在硅谷脱颖而出，但奥尔雷德并不是第一个认识到以工作为重点的教育和培训的价值的人。德国以其广泛的职业培训和学徒制度而闻名。和加利福利亚相仿，加拿大的一所技术导向型大学——滑铁卢大学，自62年成立以来，他们核心目标之一便是在学习领域找到利润可观的工作。寻求实习的学生可以参加一项特殊的计划，该计划将他们与公司们适配起来。负责该项目的诺拉•麦克雷(Norah McRae)表示，大多数大学很少花时间为毕业生找工作，也很少收到那些能使得他们在人才市场上鹤立鸡群的技能。经常的，学生被当作摇钱树，借以科研经费为由，从他们身上榨取利益。

词汇

Quirk/怪癖

Apprenticeships/  学徒，学徒制

Gainful/唯利是图的；有利益的

But Ms McRae is also concerned that programmes like Lambda School, though well-meaning, risk undermining existing educational institutions by offering a quicker route to work. The kind of intense optimisation which Lambda espouses cannot, she worries, replace conventional learning, which strives to create not just capable workers but rounded individuals.

但麦克雷也担心，像Lambda School这样的项目，虽然本意是好的，但提供了一条更快捷的工作路线，可能会破坏现有的教育机构。她担心，Lambda所支持的那种强烈的优化不能取代传统的学习，后者不仅致力于培养有能力的员工，还致力于培养全面发展的个人。

Such fears presuppose that Lambda can succeed beyond even Mr Allred’s wildest dreams—or those of the venture capitalists who pumped $30m into the firm in January, valuing it at $150m. Student numbers, and so upfront costs, are growing faster than revenues. If Lambda can turn a profit by offering people a stab at a decent job, that would be a fine lesson in capitalism.

这种担心的前提是，Lambda的成功甚至超过了奥尔雷德先生最疯狂的梦想——或者那些1月份向该公司注资3000万美元、估值1.5亿美元的风险投资家的梦想。学生人数以及前期成本的增长速度超过了收入的增长速度。如果Lambda能够通过为人们提供一份体面的工作来盈利，这将为资本主义上了很好一课。