Virtual learning broadens horizon

Wang Yue, a 25-year-old in Shanghai, keeps shifting between being a teacher during the week and being a student on the weekends, since he learned about "Coursera" a year ago.

At that time, he was teaching in a private English training school in Shanghai and earned a "pretty good salary". But he felt dull and insecure.

"Teaching the same content and skills everyday, and even saying the same jokes every day was not interesting to me," he says. "As time passed, I started to feel a bit anxious and trapped, because I wanted to learn new things."

Having been in the job for two years, he was dying to broaden his knowledge. That was when he was introduced to Coursera, an online open course platform that was set up by two professors from Stanford University in 2012. Not only does the platform provide free courses from prestigious universities from around the world, it also provides a platform for teachers and students to interact with one another.

"My life after work was immediately, amazingly broadened," Wang recalls.

When he logged on to the Coursera website for the first time, he was so thrilled to see the name of the courses that he immediately subscribed to five of them.

But it did not take him long to realize that was too much of a burden.

"Each course came with certain assignments and examinations, and required concentration till the final examination, " he says. "Currently, I am doing two courses, one an introduction to finance and accounting provided by the University of Pennsylvania, and one on teaching for learning.

Wang speaks excellent English, which he says is "the only thing he is good at", and this is to the good for Coursera, because most of the courses are in English.

Despite this, according to Coursera's statistics, by this month, two years after it was established, the platform had more than 4.9 million subscribers. "We want to share some of the best education recourses worldwide to anyone who might be interested," says Professor Andrew Ng from Stanford University, one of the two-founders of Coursera during a seminar founded by Microsoft Asian Institute that took place in Nankai University in Tianjin last year, "And for our Chinese subscribers, it brings more challenge because many courses require better English skills and the art of group work."

Yu Kai, a 32-year-old man working as a nutrition researcher at Nestle Beijing, now spends one-third of his spare time taking courses mainly on Coursera, not to attain any degree, but for the knowledge the online education platform can provide to assist him in his job.

"I am not doing this for any certificate," he says. "For me, it is really good way to motivate myself to learn new things. And though I live on my own, I have a group of online 'classmates' to discuss the course with."

In fact, online lectures and courses from prestigious Chinese and overseas universities is not something new in China. A series of courses recognized by the Ministry of Education went online on September 2011, among the most popular courses was Modern Understanding of the Analects for Confucius taught by Yu Dan, a famous professor from Beijing Normal University.

However, Yu Kai says that the latest open online courses such as Coursera's are very different.

"The interaction is the amazing part," he says. "Last year I was taking a course, Leading Strategic Innovation in Organization, and it required group work to produce a research topic. Just think in Coursera, you are actually part of a team of people from all over the world. I ended up working in a group with three other people, one from Sweden, one from Hong Kong and the other one from Brussels. It was great fun."

For some, online courses and other online learning platforms are attractive because they offer gateways into new worlds.

Wang Ye, a 28 year old in Shanghai, was looking for something different and she now enjoys both Coursera classes and lectures from TED, short for Technology, Entertainment and Design, a private non-profit organization in the United States whose lectures are shared online.

"When I first discovered TED and Coursera in 2009, what attracted me to them was the topics they covered. Frankly, they are completely different from what we used to discuss in class."

She has been particularly inspired by some of the TED talks on creativity, the universe and space, as well as feminism. Having studied in Hong Kong for four years and mastered English, she was helping translated the TED lectures so that Chinese viewers without English can watch the lecture with Chinese subtitles.

Wang studied finance at college, which is one of the most popular major for Chinese students, and now works in strategic management in a US-funded enterprise in Shanghai.

"As a Chinese student, we rarely learn about subjects like these at school, even in universities," she says. "I am so inspired by the talks, as the lectures provided me with different ways to look at the world. They made me think that the young people around me can also create our own TED-style talks, selecting and inviting speakers ourselves."

She is now spending almost all of her spare time with TEDx Shanghai, a non-profit organization that is designed to give communities, organizations and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level.

"There are ten of us working in Shanghai, with a group of volunteers, and our mission is to invite people who have performed brilliantly in certain fields to come to Shanghai and give us a talk for free," she says.

The TEDx group in Shanghai invites prominent figures from overseas to give lectures, such as Joy Chen, the former vice-mayor of Los Angeles, during her visit to China.

"The first seminar I remember was in May last year when there were less than 200 people in the audience," she says. "When we did a seminar in November, more than 400 people joined us live."

Last year, she took a personal trip to Taiwan, to select a candidate for TEDxTheGardenBridge, a project that focuses on finding women's value in the modern world.

"What the virtual world is bringing us is resources that we did not dare to imagine even a decade ago. So we need to make the best out of them," she says.