A growing number of
universities in Shanghai are equipping themselves with distance
learning centers to connect local classes to their counterparts
abroad.
Shanghai Normal
University, one of two teacher-training universities in the city,
has invested more than one million yuan (US$135,768) to launch a
distance learning center together with University of Dayton in the
United States.
Students will be able to
not only listen to real-time lectures given at American faculties
and take down notes but also ask questions and interact with
professors overseas by speaking via microphones on their
desks.
Students will also be
able to download the lectures so they can listen to them again
afterwards, university officials said.
The university's school
of mechanics and electronics engineering teamed up with the
University of Dayton to set up a joint undergraduate program in
2003. Part of the program's students will have opportunity to be
sent to the US for their last year, which costs about 200,000 yuan
in total. However, only about 10 percent of the 130-plus first
batch of students went abroad due to either performance or family
economic reasons, school officials said.
"The distance-learning
lab has proved to be a cost-efficient approach to making
world-class facilities and educational resources available to the
students without asking them to leave the city," said Xiang
Jiaxiang, the university vice president.
Overseas distance
classes will be given twice a week, but it's open to students of
the joint program only for the moment. Xiang said the university
was planning to build more such centers to cover all the more than
2,000 students of its six international joint education
programs.
The university is only
one of several universities to have created overseas education
centers in recent years.
In 2003, Fudan
University launched its first overseas education center with Yale
University to bring live classes in New Haven to local
students.
(Shanhai Daily
December 17, 2007)