Prof. Xinjie Yu has been a Professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tsinghua University since 2001, and he also teaches two classes on edX called, “New Course Mode in e-Era” and “Principles of Electric Circuits”. Prof. Yu was named one of the recipients of the inaugural “Tsinghua New Century Teaching Achievement Award”.

(Prof. Xinjie Yu "Sharing His Greatest Joy in Teaching" upon receiving Teaching Achievement Award)

In a recent sharing, he argues that if you are a good teacher in a traditional classroom you will still be a good teacher online, and if you are a bad teacher in a traditional classroom you will still be a bad teacher offline. Simply put, online teaching puts your teaching skills under the microscope, thus magnifying your flaws and making it much more difficult to hide them, even some of the most charismatic lecturers cannot escape.

After having taught both offline for two decades and then online too in recent years, he observed that there are three stages of online teaching and suggested teachers must not be lazy and include all the stages when teaching online.

While teachers online frequently use information delivery tools (e.g., live-streaming platforms, network conference applications and specially-designed teaching tools such as Rain Classroom) to deliver their message and sometimes would get responses from students with learning feedbacks tools (in the forms of audio, text, learners’ data), but very rarely would teachers truly engage their students online and shift from teaching to learning. Prof. Yu believes that online technology has gone a long way since he started teaching 20 years ago, and there really shouldn't be any excuses. There is now real-time analytics from in-class quiz results, breakout rooms feature to allow smaller group discussion, or function to let teachers annotate just like using a physical blackboard or whiteboard (and possibly more too).

To sum up, using a Chinese proverb by Xunzi:

“tell me and I forget,

teach me and I remember,

involve me and I learn.”