Most of you are receiving this because of your interactions with MOE Research Center for Online Education, UNESCO-ICEE, or xuetangX. Since xuetangX founding in 2013, it has been the first choice for many universities and faculty in China, accumulating 49 million registered users for both its MOOC platform and Rain Classroom (a smart teaching and learning tool developed by Tsinghua University for live broadcast lessons, recorded videos, classroom interactions and learning data collection), which recently saw an increase of 5 million and 11 million registered users respectively.

Shuaiguo Wang, President of xuetangX and founder of the Rain Classroom project, has recently shared his thoughts in this unprecedented time during an interview with the Chinese Distance Learning magazine e-Learning (in Chinese). Here are a few key learnings we would like to share with you:

“There is no online learning, it’s just learning”

XuetangX has not been emphasizing nor been differentiating between online education mode and traditional classroom mode anymore, as we have seen online elements regardless. Therefore fortunately, this critical mindset has led us to fully integrate data from both online and classroom learning prior to the epidemic, thus providing more comprehensive analysis to improve learning outcome.

“Different learners have different preferences toward learn online”

We are currently serving over 12 million students in China during the current university closures. Therefore, in order to better empathize with and improve students’ user experience, xuetangX has formed strategic partnership with popular short-video app Kuaishou (more than 200 million daily active users) since February 2020. Now, we have expanded our Rain Classroom offerings to support live broadcast in the forms of video, audio, screencast, slides, blackboard, etc. to better meet the needs of online education.

“Moving beyond online video lectures to personalized learning”

In addition to working on how to better evaluate and assess online teaching and learning, we are planning to apply more AI related technologies to our classroom (online or offline), especially through the analysis of real-time and holistic data to push personalized educational resources. Thus, helping us to move one step closer to realize personalized teaching and learning.