on april 28, 2020, the "online education experience exchange seminar" was successfully held online. this event was jointly organized by tsinghua university latin american center, the lifelong education office of tsinghua university and the school of mathematics and physics of the university of chile. a total of 28 people from the two universities participated in the exchange and shared the online teaching experience.
tsinghua university was implementing a range of measures to prevent and control the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. during this period, students had been advised to postpone their return to the university. in order to reduce the related disruption to teaching, tsinghua university leveraged its strength in information technology and innovation-based education to offer courses online by combining tsinghua rain classroom software with mooc and other platforms. in less than two weeks, more than 2,600 teachers received online teaching training, and 3,923 courses were successfully launched online. tsinghua university has accumulated rich experience in the course of online education practice.
chile is also facing the similar situation on its education. due to the social explosion that happened in the end of 2019 and the pandemic in 2020, the university of chile put a large effort on continuing the teaching through online form, and also accumulated experience in such process. both universities recognize that online teaching is an effective means to ensure the continuity of education, especially under the current severe epidemic situation,
professors are sharing experience about online education
francisco martínez, dean of the school of mathematics and physics of the university of chile, when giving his speech he said he hoped to have more joint discussions on how to conduct online teaching more effectively together with tsinghua university.
xiaoxiao wang, associate dean of the office of lifelong education administration and associate dean of the undergraduate academic affairs office at tsinghua university, introduced online education development at tsinghua university before and after the pandemic. she mentioned that during the pandemic, tsinghua university set up three online teaching expert groups including an expert group for online teaching guidance, an expert group for online learning quality assurance and the third expert group for online teaching technology assurance. besides, tsinghua university also established a working group in order to support students' learning. this measure helps to ensure online teaching and learning of teachers and students.
xinjie yu, professor of department of electrical engineering and applied electronic technology, head of online teaching guidance expert group, ying long, associate professor of department of city planning, school of architecture, weifeng qiao, assistant professor of research of institute of education, gave presentations about their experience on how to use the online tools, how to train the teachers, what skills they mainly used, and what solutions are applied for improving the involvement of students and carrying out exams, etc.
prof. felipe celery, prof. sebastián ríos, prof. luciano villarroel and mr. jorge díaz from university of chile presented the actual situation about the online education in the university, by introducing some specific cases. they also pointed out some challenges they are facing during the online teaching, for example, how to do effective online evaluations, how to improve students' involvement in the virtual classroom, etc. regarding these similar difficulties, professors from tsinghua university made a discussion with their counterparts, trying to find some more effective ways.
this seminar was presided by professor luis vargas. he believed that the seminar was very meaningful and looked forward to further exchanges and cooperation with tsinghua university in this field.
in the end of the seminar, professor taotao chen, director of tsinghua university latin american center, said that it was normal for online education to face many challenges at present. to cope with these challenges, cooperation of both universities will be required to continuously explore new solutions in the future.
