From Classroom Podium to Cloud Services- USST Professors Turned into “Anchors”

At the very beginning of online education, USST launched three online teaching platforms to give faculty members more flexibilities. Whether professors choose live or recorded broadcast platform, they reach a consensus that what they teach counts.
When Professor Gu Zhengxian taught College Physics A1 online, his passion, resonant voice, and clear and beautiful blackboard writings instantly caught the attention of his students. Professor Gu believed that live broadcast could, to a large extent, simulate the real-time classroom. If coupled with discussion before and after live broadcast, live broadcast could be an efficient and much-loved online teaching approach.

“You can not make more than enough preparations in teaching”, said Li Yilin from School of Environment and Architecture. "To achieve better effects, I spend 2 hours preparing for a ten-minute broadcast. I have to think what I should offer from the perspective of the students. I decided that during the first period, we should talk about the contributions made by the professionals in architecture and environment field to fighting the Covid-19 epidemic to help the students know the meaning of education and enhance their sense of patriotism,” said Li Yilin.

The faculty team of the course, Comprehensive German, invited over 20 online TAs to participate in the teaching. In this way, the students transferred their role of being passive listeners to be active participants. The students were organized into different groups, such keynote speech group and text analysis group, and they were expected to design their own teaching procedures, and make a video clip of 10-15 minutes. Apart from bettering online instruction, faculty members were trying to figure out how to use  what they have learned from online teaching to improve their future real-time classroom instruction.

“In a real-time classroom, students are likely to refrain themselves in the debate session, because they are afraid of being misunderstood as being shown off, but online courses offer them a wonderful opportunity to put forward their ideas and express their thoughts,” said Sui Guorong from School of Optical-electrical and Computer Engineering. Sometimes 10 minutes after the class was over, questions still popped up on professor Sui’s screen. Such heated discussion made Sui reluctant to switch off his computer.

Undergraduate online course also offered Professor Tang Hao from College of Communication and Art Design inspirations for his M.A course, Smart product Design. The Smart Product Design course required Professor Tang of inviting business practitioners to share their actual experience with the students so that the students could put what they have learned into practice. “The online courses enlightened us that we could interact and share information with business practitioners on line, which can save time and inform the students of the latest developments of the industry. This approach would be definitely tried on a more regular basis” Said Professor Tang.