Top Chinese universities move to online courses

Shanghai Jiaotong University is one of the latest top Chinese universities to take up the new global trend in on-line learning.

Fudan University is also a member of Coursera, which offers free online courses by 81 universities and institutions of higher learning across the world.

Another two top universities, Tsinghua and Peking, joined the edX in May this year. The online education platform was set up in 2012 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

China's Ministry of Education set up an official open course website in 2003. To date, 286 courses have been posted on the Internet. The current national ten-year plan says that by 2015, the public will have access to at least 1,000 video lessons, offered by 120 universities.