Two courses from the School of Humanities (SoH) of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) were included in the Virtual Student Exchange (VSE) Program of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) in December 2020. One is “Two Thousand Years of Sino-foreign Cultural Exchanges”, an English course taught by Professor Zhang Zhaoyang , and the other is “Elementary Chinese 1”, a general course taught by Associate Professor Wang Jun.
The Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU) is a consortium of leading research universities in the Pacific Rim aimed at promoting mutual exchanges and common development. Its members include 56 world-class universities, such as the California Institute of Technology, the University of Melbourne, the National University of Singapore and Waseda University, among which there are 10 leading universities in the Chinese Mainland such as Peking University, Tsinghua University and SJTU.
In the post-pandemic era, SJTU has been exploring new patterns of international communication and cooperation. It introduced three patterns, i.e., curriculum sharing, curriculum co-development and curriculum bringing-in, by jointly building virtual classes with global universities, as an alternative to overseas student exchange programs.
In October 2020, SJTU encouraged its schools to apply for the APRU-VSE program. With all the schools of SJTU as participants, 12 teaching teams passed the preliminary review and entered the question-and-answer session. After the evaluation of the review committee, five SJTU courses were finally approved, two of which were submitted by the SoH.
As a full English course introduced by the SoH, “Two-Millennia Cultural Exchanges Between China and the Rest of World” was regarded as one of the best demonstrative courses among all universities in Shanghai aimed at international students . Based on the general history of China and its cultural exchanges, this course provides an insight into the interactions between the Chinese civilization and other civilizations across the globe with a focus on the cultural communication that took place on the Silk Road on land and on its maritime branch, under the framework of the historical vicissitudes in the period from the Qin dynasties to the Qing dynasties. With the latest archaeological findings and research outcomes, this course enables students to experience the historical Sino-foreign cultural communication from multiple perspectives.
Based on a massive open online course (MOOC) titled “Hello, Chinese”, “Elementary Chinese 1” is an online course developed by the SoH dedicated to Chinese language learners at beginner and intermediate levels, and has been published on Coursera, the world’s largest online learning platform, and iCourse, the largest MOOC platform in China. The beginner-level course has been accessible on Coursera for 3 years and learned by approximately 30,000 students, and the part of the course dedicated to intermediate learners has been accessible for two rounds on iCourse and learned by approximately 7,000 students. It has become an online Chinese language course with extensive influence, and was included in the list of China’s best undergraduate courses in 2020.
