Passage Three

Across the country, university students sit in lectures every day, listening to someone speak for an hour in crowded theatres. Most are daydreaming, checking Facebook, surfing the web, texting and tweeting; if they're particularly motivated or the lecture is unusually good, some might actually be paying attention.

At the same time, millions of learners around the world arc watching world-class lectures online about every' subject imaginable, from fractional reserve banking to moral philosophy to pharmacology, supplied by Harvard, MIT, and The Open University.

One group gets its education for free， and the other pays thousands of pounds per year. It's a situation that can't continue, and unless universities face up to the Internet's fierce competition they won't have any future.

We have a romantic ideal of universities being places of higher education where students absorb knowledge, skills and critical thinking-an ideal modeled over centuries on universities like Oxford and Heidelberg. Since they used a multi-year, highly structured residential course of lectures, tutorials, and exams to produce smart graduates, we now believe that this same model ought to work for the majority of the adult population.

“We're wrong. The simple fact is that university.” lectures never worked that well in the first place—it's just that for centuries， we didn't have any better option for transmitting information.

In fact， the success of top universities， both now and historically， is in spite of lectures, not because of it.

The mediocrity of the average lecturer was made very clear when I watched Prof Michael Sande's fantastically engaging Harvard philosophy lectures on Justice on YouTube, seen by millions around the world. Other universities, including MIT's Open Course Ware and The Open University， now offer videos of lectures free as a matter of course.

“Anyone online can now watch thousands of world-class lectures whenever they want. They can pause and rewind if they don't understand something, and they can review” the transcript when revising. At some universities, they can even email questions to lecturers without the risk of embarrassment.

Freely available online lectures and textbooks give universities the opportunity to reduce costs and increase quality, while focusing resources on what really matters: contact time between teachers and students. The simple fact is that the education most universities provide isn't worth the money. If they don't have world-class reputations—and only a few do—then they need to change fast, or watch an exodus of students away to cheaper, better alternatives.

The author wrote the first two paragraphs in order to ________.

Which of the following CANNOT be inferred from Paragraph 4?

What does the last sentence of Paragraph 5 possibly mean?

The difference between traditional lectures and online lectures is________.

What is the main idea of the passage?