Online Courses Get High Marks

Up to 100 online open courses will be offered by the end of the year, and as many as 1,000 courses will be available by the end of 2015, the ministry says.

Cyberspace lectures have gained in popularity in China over the past two or three years, relying mainly on courses from foreign universities, subtitled in Chinese.

"We started to put overseas open courses online in October (2010), and soon got unexpectedly high downloading rates," says Zhan Yuanyuan from NetEase, the only commercial portal to join the ministry program. "At one time, the number of people who downloaded online courses surpassed downloads of American TV series."

NetEase confirms Positive Philosophy from Harvard University is one of the most viewed courses on the website, with 50 million hits since October 2010. In response, the website set up a team of more than 100 people to work on subtitling foreign courses.

"What we learn from real classes at school is kind of limited, and we want fresh ideas from lectures at other universities," says the 25-year postgraduate student Wang Ji, at Anhui University.

Diana E. E. Kleiner, director of the Open Yale Courses project at Yale University says in an e-mail interview that she is delighted to learn that Open Yale Courses have generated so much interest in China.

She says the university has been releasing its courses online since 2007, aiming to "expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn".

"The classes are filmed at the same time they are being taught to regular students," Kleiner says. "I like to call this 'reality teaching' and it allows those taking the courses online to come as close as possible to being present in the actual Yale classroom."