Chinese Universities Launch Open Online Courses, But No One Cares

Not exactly a full house...

Yesterday saw the official opening of an official open courses channel run by Chinese universities in cooperation with Netease and Aikecheng net. The program, called “Chinese Universities Video Open Courses”, is streaming twenty courses for free online.

Unfortunately, no one seems to care. Though only a day in, the project has gotten dismally low traffic, despite a major media blitz that included stories on lots of top portals the day before its launch.

Just how low is low? Well, Beijing Normal University Prof. Yu Dan’s class on an esoteric ancient text attracted only 186 viewers. But if you think that’s the worst of it, think again! A class being offered by Renmin University only had 12 people click on it, and not a single one of them stayed until the end.

Users complained that the lectures were boring and artificial, and given the topic of Yu Dan’s class, we can’t help but wonder who it was that chose courses like that to lead off the program. I took a fair number of courses on obscure ancient Chinese texts when I was in college, so I’m not denying the subject can be interesting, but it’s not exactly a crowd-pleaser, and it’s not usually the sort of course one starts off with.

According to Sina’s article, Chinese education experts have recommended that professors make the open classes interesting, which sort of seems like a no-brainer to us. But many Chinese professors are used to a captive audience and an extremely dry lecture style wouldn’t catch the attention of anyone who didn’t feel they needed to take notes for future exams. The failure of these online courses is perhaps just a symptom of a larger problem in China’s college education: for the most part, it’s really boring.

But until they manage to make classes more interesting, we’re sure they’ll have at least one student watching:

[Via Sina Tech]