[Southeast University News Network, April 28] (Correspondent: Jiang Xuehua) As invited by the internationally renowned journal “Nature Materials”, Sun Litao, Tang Yongming and Zuo Wei from Southeast University introduced the online education experience of Chinese universities represented by SEU with the title of “Online Education under the Impact of COVID-19” to all over the world.
The pandemic COVID-19 easily broke through national borders, which has caused global stagnation only in three months and also verified the close connections among countries and regions. With the epidemic development, in order to effectively control the spread of the virus, China has implemented a nationwide “school suspension”, which has resulted in an unprecedented large-scale experiment of networked remote online education. How to provide high-quality remote online education while fighting against the epidemic has become the core concern at present.
In order to deeply understand the effectiveness of this large-scale online education, the research team conducted a statistical survey among SEU undergraduates and received 39,854 valid course evaluation questionnaires. The feedback indicated that about 50% students thought that this online education could absolutely complete the planned teaching goals, and 46% students thought that the teaching goals could be basically completed. It is worth noting that most students believed this online education could not only maintain the continuity of normal curriculum, but also facilitate the teachers to relieve the students’ mental pressure arising from isolation in the course of teaching and help spread positive influences to overcome the epidemic (see Fig. 1). However, relatively lower score was obtained regarding the option that “Can I restrain myself and concentrate on online courses?”, indicating that the students had to improve their self-discipline and concentration under the interference of unstable network speed, noises in daily life at home and shortage of professional facilities, etc..Meanwhile, the students suggested integrating the recording and broadcasting teaching as well as live broadcasting teaching with more online interactions so as to increase the students’ participation and alleviate the impacts of these adverse factors to a certain extent. There were also many students who suggested a unified teaching platform with playback function and the arrangement of reasonable and appropriate homework. In the near future, the research team expects that the wide application of 5G and AI technology can help break through the limitations of time and space, realize the rapid replication and transmission of information, optimize teaching resources, enrich presentation tools and greatly improve network speed.
Fig. 1 Statistics of 39,854 student evaluation questionnaires from Southeast University.
a. Achievement of teaching goals; b. Online teaching quality score (each individual item has a full score of 10 points).
In addition to online courses, this paper also introduced various possible online scientific research situations and problems. Doctoral and postgraduate students may apply for online thesis defenses. Positively speaking, this makes it possible to invite members of the defense committee freely, which may save time and travel costs. The tutors can also adjust the research projects of senior undergraduates, as the case may be, so that these senior undergraduates may successfully develop and accomplish their projects at home or in other ways.
Although the outbreak of COVID-19 has already brought about serious impacts on carrying out education normally, universities can make use of this unpredictable opportunity to find out problems and deficiencies, accelerate the online teaching reform and improve the online teaching quality by renewing concepts, upgrading technology, optimizing resources, improving capabilities and innovative management, etc..At the same time, universities need to transform this sudden emergency to an opportunity of enhancing international cooperation and establishing a global online education network that can share experience, knowledge and resources mutually.
This work has been strongly supported by leaders, teachers and classmates of the school leadership, the Teachers & Teaching Development Center, the Academic Affairs Office, the Scientific Research Institute, and the School of Electronic Science and Engineering. This invitation to introduce SEU’s experience also indicates SEU has won increasing international attentions in scientific research, etc. in recent years. Especially in the early period of the epidemic, more than 400,000 “graphene-based masks” for long-term use that were manufactured on the basis of the research achievement of Prof. Sun Litao from Southeast University were sent to Wuhan for the first time to achieve effective protection as early as possible from the source. This event was widely concerned and reported by international technology media Wiley, Xinhuanet, “Science and Technology Daily”, “China Youth Daily” and the platform for learning a powerful country, etc.. Moreover, it has been widely acclaimed by the society, believing it as a direct representation of solving actual problems and serving the people with science and technology.
Paper’s link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-020-0678-8
Submitted by: the School of School of Electronic Science and Engineering
