On Dec. 2, the Beijing time (Dec.1，CST), The Journey of Mathematics and the Traditional Chinese Medicine and Chinese Culture, two excellent courses of SJTU, have been released on Coursera, the world's largest platform for online courses. All learners around the world could have access to them. As two shared courses firstly being released on Coursera among Universities and Colleges in Shanghai, The Journey of Mathematics would lead us to a wonderful mathematical world, while Traditional Chinese Medicine and Chinese Culture explore the traditional Chinese medicine and its underlying Chinese traditional culture. One of the founders of Coursera, Andrew Ng from the Standford University has spoken highly of SJTU's courses, looking forward to these courses.
MOOCs: To Create a Brand New Mode for Collegial Courses
MOOCS, shorted for Massive Open Online Courses, has in this Information Age gradually become the advanced form of online education as well as the brand new mode for colleges and universities' courses. Founded in 2012, MOOCS has become the most popular mode for online courses.
Huang Zhen, Vice President of SJTU, has listed five features of MOOCS. The first lies in its large-scale of students. Compared with traditional courses which are delivered only to dozens of or hundreds of students, an online course has tens of thousands of or even hundreds of thousands of students. The second is its openness, which indicates that anyone, in accordance with his/her interests, could have the access to any courses regardless of his/her nationality. The third focuses on its being online, i.e. students could learn online, free from any time or space restrictions. The forth is its vividness, referring to the utilization of several teaching methods, interesting forms and the emphasis on presentation. And the fifth, its interaction, has constituted a powerful learning community.
The founding of MOOCS has free course-choosing from restrictions of time, space, universities, or colleges. As long as one is interested in traditional Chinese culture, he/she could "have a seat" on the hottest class of SJTU and take a close look at top teachers.
Translated by Liu Lupin Reviewed by Wang Bingyu