Cloud Classes Help Students Study at home

On February 17, Yang Shuhan, a junior student majoring in Industrial Design started the first class of this semester at her home. She attended nine classes that day on different network terminals like Learning Through, Rain Classroom, MOOC and Zhihui Tree. Like Yang, more than nineteen thousand undergraduates and 4660 postgraduates from Tianjin University resumed their new semester online while staying at home all over China.

As part of a wide range of novel coronavirus prevention and control measures, Tianjin University opened its new semester online and educated students with cloud classes. On the first day of the semester, 380 online courses were given to 40964 undergraduate students and 590 online classes for postgraduates with 23779 attendance.

Dr. Ma’s online class 

“We face difficulties of occasional network delay. To solve the problem, we record classes beforehand and use the video as a backup in case of any network congestion,” said Dr. Ma Xiaofei, an associate professor from the School of Sciences who teaches inorganic chemistry and chemical analysis this semester. It was not the first time for Dr. Ma to employ cloud classes. Still, he felt nervous. “Normally, inline teaching is a supplement to the face-to-face teaching. But this time, it is the only way of teaching we offer. We have to teach not only textbook online, but also to help student carry out experiments via internet. That’s the challenge.” Eventually, Dr Ma develops an online teaching including real-time online teaching, video recording, and teaching material sharing as cloud class combo. “With this combo, we hope to provide students qualified online teaching as if they were in physical classroom.” Dr. Ma noted.

To ensure the teaching quality of online classes, Tianjin University carried out a daily survey about students’ feedback on the classes and inquired teachers to adjust their teaching accordingly.

“The trend of cloud classes poses a great challenge for all the teachers. Students can choose which class to attend, when to learn and where to learn. The university should take the opportunity to reform its education mode.” Wang Jianrong, the Deputy Dean of the College of Intelligence and Computing said.

Editor: Eva Yin