Sharing and Growing
Tsinghua holds Online Learning Knowledge Sharing Webinar
“At this critical moment, it’s very important for us to work together, sharing experiences and facing the challenges together,” said Yang bin, Vice President and Provost of Tsinghua University, at the Online Learning Knowledge Sharing Webinar.
The webinar gathered the heads of 11 universities online to share about online learning in response to COVID-19 during the pandemic. It is hoped that through this webinar, universities will discover impactful policies, successful practices of online learning, and the insightful perspectives that will lead to the changes in education will be generated.
In the opening remark, Yang Bin reviewed the online learning practices adopted by Tsinghua University since the outbreak of epidemic. Following the guidelines from the government, Tsinghua University decided to make a full transition from traditional classes to online classes to overcome the disruption from school closures. On February 3rd, over 50,000 students, faculty and staff members and alumni representatives attended a special lecture online. Pandemic prevention work and the arrangement of the spring semester were elaborated by the University leaders. Within two weeks, more than 2,600 faculty members attended training activities to prepare for the online teaching. Tsinghua also established several expert groups to help all teachers to ensure quality of the online courses. On February 17th, 3,923 courses began online as scheduled. Meantime, Tsinghua has also promoted university-level research online learning to support after COVID-19 policies and practices.
“In the future, we hope to continue to strengthen our connection and cooperation with universities on online learning, including collaborative research, joint online courses, joint forums, technology sharing and so on,” Yang noted.
Prof. George Siemens, Founder of MOOCs, Professor of Psychology, University of Texas at Arlington & Co-Director of the Centre for Change and Complexity in Learning (C3L), University of South Australia, delivered a keynote address.
“I do want to give a particular thank you to Provost Yang Bin for providing such a nice overview of how China has responded and what I think some of the important implications are quickly moving an entire education system online,” said Prof. George Siemens.
In the address, Prof. George Siemens shared his experience and perspectives on online learning and massive open online courses from five aspects: the practice of teaching an online environment, frameworks and models, the scale of MOOCs, connections and connectivity, and 100-person theory of knowledge. “There is an extensive base on how you socialize online, how you create content online, how you support interaction, and how can you do that in different knowledge domain, a big lesson that leaders and academics need to communicate across their institutions,” he emphasized.
Prof. George Siemens concluded the address by asking “What are we teaching systems need to do?” He cited an example to answer this, “If you take 100 random people from society, they can teach each other an enormous corpus of human knowledge because just by virtue of being different people with different backgrounds and different interests, we have the ability to provide knowledge to one another. So what are we teaching systems need to do? Is to move away from sharing what an expert knows?”
“Not exclusively, we need experts, obviously, but to move to an environment where our learning systems activate the latent knowledge capacity of the broader network and where we bring in more efforts from students in terms of content creation, artifact creation, and even code teaching,” he said.
Attending the webinar were: Prof. Naebboon Hoonchareon, Assistant to the President for Academic Affairs, Chulalongkorn University; Prof. Mukhopadhyay Anirban, Associate Dean, School of Business and Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Dr. Mezyad Alterkawi, Director of International Cooperation and Scientific Twinning Department, King Saud University; Ms. Aiman Khamitova, Senior manager of Innovative learning at Office of the provost, Nazarbayev University; Prof. LU Junlin, Associate Dean, Undergraduate Academic Affairs Office, Peking University; Prof. Francois GREY, Director, Geneva Tsinghua Initiative, University Informatics Center, University of Geneva; Prof. Hassan M. Selim, Dean, University College Director, Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning, United Arab Emirates University; Ms. SU Peng, Associate Dean, Undergraduate Academic Affairs Office & Associate Dean, Office of Lifelong Education Administration, Tsinghua University. They shared the practices and experiences about online learning in response to COVID-19 at their universities respectively and provided valuable suggestions for the teaching and learning in the future.
Prof. Yu Xinjie, Group Leader of the Online Education Expert Group, Prof. Li Junfeng, Vice Provost & Dean of Undergraduate Academic Affairs Office and Mr. Pan shoudong, Vice President of XuetangX at Tsinghua University also attended the webinar.
Reporter: Guo Lili
