Universities jump into online courses

China Daily 19 January 2018

According to its ministry of education, China ranks first in the number of massive open online courses or MOOCs – with 3,200 launched by 460 higher education institutions, including 200 courses available on foreign MOOC platforms, reports China Daily.

Since 2012, China has established 10 MOOC platforms, and 55 million people have tried the courses, including more than 6 million university students who have earned credits by finishing the courses, said Wu Yan, director of the ministry's Department of Higher Education.

On Monday, the ministry selected and released the first batch of 490 national-level MOOCs, 70.2% of which were established by China's top universities. Some 78 of those courses have been taken by more than 100,000 learners. For example, more than 980,000 have taken the College Oral English Course developed by National University of Defense Technology. The ministry will identify 10,000 courses of national-level quality by 2020 – 3,000 MOOCs and 7,000 offline courses – to promote the improvement of higher education, Wu said.
Full report on the China.org.cn site

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