My Preparation for Online Course Teaching

Dear colleagues:

I will share my experience of preparing for online teaching in the past two days with you all, hoping to shorten your time of exploration. I, an absolute technical newbie, believe that everyone will be able to master the platform I can master.

1. It is very important to adjust mental attitudes. During the special period, everyone can understand why we have to teach online and must shoulder the inevitable responsibility, so we can take this teaching practice as an opportunity to get in touch with information-based teaching quickly and to make a contribution to the battle. I call on everyone to change what we can change and adapt to what we cannot change.

2. After embracing the positive attitude, please patiently study the school's various notices and documents on the development of online teaching. From my perspective, the most effective way to learn is to listen to the school’s online training video course (it takes 30 minutes). In fact, with the talents of you all, it is easy to fully understand and quickly master the “Luojia Online”, “Learning Through”,”Virtual Classroom” and other “New” things. If teachers only study the PPT file of “Wuhan University--Online Teaching Guide during the Postponement Period (Teacher Edition)”, it is really difficult to fully understand the platform. Therefore, it must be combined with practical operations. As a matter of fact, although it is not as complicated as imagined, there really is no shortcut.

3. The basic steps of teaching preparation are as follows: Firstly, you should listen to the training course. Secondly, you should activate courses on the computer according to the teaching guide, and then install the Learning Through APP on the mobile phone. Finally, you should familiarize yourself with the interface, functions and operations of its computer and mobile terminals, upload relevant teaching files and be prepared for teaching.

4. I’ve distilled my comprehension of the main functions of “Luojia Online (Computer terminal) + Learning Through (APP)” into the five tips you see below: (1) We have to punch in on the platform every time before giving a class, which provides a basis for school teaching inspection (it is very important); (2) We can use the platform to upload and share teaching materials; (3) Daily sign-in, testing, homework assignments and other basic teaching functions are included; (4) As for online teaching, this platform can only achieve “PPT + voice remote teaching” at present, so you may be a bit disappointed if you want to become an Internet celebrity by this opportunity; (5) This platform is connected to undergraduate educational administration system of our university, so all students’ information is already in it.

5. From what I tried yesterday, I found that the “Luojia Online (Computer terminal) + Learning Through (APP)” provided by the school are insufficient. The reasons are as follows: Firstly, functions of the platform is limited and incomplete. Secondly, when everyone uses it together, unexpected events such as online jams and server crashes are likely to occur. Therefore, in order to avoid being at a loss when the “accident” occurs, and to achieve a barely satisfactory online teaching effect at least, we must make other plans for substitution, cooperation, and emergency rather than pin all hopes on the only platform provided by the school.

6. Let me talk about how to plan. In the early stage, I remember that our department of world economics issued a notice, including a sentence as follows: “teachers can also teach via Tencent Classroom, Tencent Conference, Rain Classroom, QQ Group, WeChat Group, etc”. Based on the guidance, I found out the following set of plans yesterday: (1) We should give full play to the role of QQ groups. If it is hard for you to master Luojia Online and Learning Through in a short period of time, using QQ group functions, such as group file sharing and group announcements, would be more familiar and easier for you. In the event of network jams or crashes, you can quickly switch to the QQ group and adopt its video call function which is combined with the “sharing screen” function for emergency. (2) I want to recommend Tencent Classroom after having a try, it’s relatively easy to manipulate.(The following includes more detailed introduction.)

7. The teaching plan I have drawn up is: (1) to use basic functions of “Luojia Online (Computer Terminal) + Learning Through(APP)” to punch in and share teaching materials, especially to complete the designated actions required by the school; (2) to use Tencent Classroom to conduct webcast teaching; (3) to use QQ group for teacher-student communication and emergency response.

8. When you search on Baidu with “Tencent Classroom” as a keyword, you can download Tencent Classroom on your computer and mobile phone. It is recommended to use its computer terminal software to teach classes. You can download “Tencent Classroom Express (Teacher)” which can simultaneously achieve PPT presentation and real-time teaching. Through this platform, you can make students just watch the PPT and hear your lecture; you can turn on your real-time video if you want to appear on the scene; you can also share your screen, for example, showing a pdf file to students. In addition, other basic functions such as sign-in, blackboard-writing and question-answering are available. I recommend it for its simple functions and operation. However, its shortcoming is that the server will cannot support when everyone uses the platform intensively.

9. I warmly remind you that no matter which platform you choose, it is necessary to familiar with it in advance. At the same time, a good psychological preparation is required. Imagining that you have no idea about the platform, however, students ask you first for help when they encounter any software and technical problems. How troublesome it is! Therefore, it is essential for you to take some time to prepare and familiarize yourself with the operations.

10. No matter which platform you choose to use, you must inform students in the QQ course group to install the corresponding software on their computers and mobile phones, and let them familiarize with the software in advance. Currently, I have only tried and figured out the above online teaching plans and experiences. I sincerely hope it can be helpful and useful for you teachers. If anyone else find a better software or method, we would be willing to learn together.

Du Li

February 11st, 2020

((Translator: Heke; Revise: Zhang Yujie))