Universities eye global opportunities in online learning

By WANG HONGYI in ShanghaiTop universities have begun moving away from traditional methods of teaching and are promoting their courses globally through Coursera, the worldwide online free course platform.迷你倉Shanghai Jiao Tong University rolled out another two Chinese online courses earlier this month on the US-based platform.The two courses are Law and Society, lectured by Ji Weidong, chair professor of KoGuan Law School at the university, and Exploring the Particle World, lectured by Ji Xiangdong, chair professor and dean of the physics department.Through a combination of lectures with multimedia presentation, Law and Society is designed to enable students to gain a general knowledge of sociology, to analyze legal institutions and norms by comparative means, and to have a clearer idea of the legal tradition and its evolution in China.While the course Exploring the Particle World gives a brief introduction of the main content, and the frontier, of particle physics in popular language, according to the university.In December, the university took the lead among Chinese universities launching two Chinese courses on Coursera; The Journey of Mathematics and Traditional Chinese Medicine and Chinese Culture.The move was a significant step in education reform across the country.About 9,000 domestic and overseas students signed up for the TCM course within 12 hours while the mathematics course drew 6,000.Shanghai Jiao Tong University said it planned to launch two online courses on this platform each month. And another two courses, Media Criticism: Theory and Method and Appreciation of Tang and Song Poetry will come out soon.Other top Chinese universities will also offer Chinese and English classes on Coursera, such as Fudan University and Peking University.Also this month, Fudan University launched its online course Big Data and Information Dissemination, which focuses on regular patterns of interac自存倉ions among people, media and information in social media.The world has seen a boom in online education with the increasing popularity of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. Millions of students from around the world have enrolled in free online course platforms, such as Coursera, Udacity and edX.In October 2013, Coursera announced a partnership with Chinese Internet company NetEase to extend its resources to more online users in China. As a result of this partnership, a Chinese-language Web portal Coursera Zone, which features Chinese-language course synopses, student testimonials, FAQs, and discussion forums, was hosted on NetEase's education website, open.163.com."Coursera is a global platform, not just a platform for students in Europe or the US,'' Coursera co-founder and CEO Andrew Ng told China Daily."People everywhere in the world can join it.''For the translation part, Coursera said it has worked with volunteer translator community Yeeyan and Chinese social networking site Guokr to translate the most popular English-language courses."Coursera has partnered with several universities, including Peking University, and they will help to expand Chinese-language course offerings," Andrew Ng said."We encourage more top Chinese universities to participate on this platform and ensure that learners from around the world will share excellent education resources," he said.Huang Zhen, vice-president of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, spoke of a new era."We are living in a time of online education with more and more people able to access the Internet. The popularity of open online courses will not only break the walls of tradition but also bring revolutionary change in the concept of education."The popularity of open online courses will not only break the walls of tradition but also bring revolutionary change in the concept of education."Huang Zhenvice-president of ShanghaiJiao Tong University迷你倉出租