12th July 2018 marked the completion ceremony for the online course “Appreciation and Creation of Traditional Chinese Landscape Paintings Moodle Platform”, an exchange and popularisation project from National Arts Fund in partnership with the Open University of China (OUC). The completion ceremony was held by the faculty and students on the project team from the OUC headquarters, Harbin branch, and Xi’an branch.
The course officially commenced on 7th May this year and ended on 8th July. A total of 1,286 learners from China, the US, Singapore, and other countries participated in the course. The students from the OUC system came from the headquarters, the Harbin, Xi’an, Zhejiang, Chengdu, Inner Mongolia, and Fujian branches, and Ningbo teaching base. Sixty-eight teachers worked as course tutors or head teachers.
OUC vice president Liu Chen delivered a speech focusing on four aspects. Firstly, the state is paying greater attention to the inheritance and development of traditional Chinese culture and the presentation of this course is in line with this trend. Secondly, the exploration is motivated by innate social impetus. The OUC has succeeded in exploring a new method of teaching via the pilot online course of the project, demonstrating that the OUC will provide diversified education support to all the people by making use of information technology in the transition to the new era. Thirdly, it is hoped that art education will consider how to innovate and develop skill courses in traditional culture and arts using modern information technology, to upgrade the communication and learning efficiency of traditional culture with new technology, and to make new contributions to the dissemination of traditional culture. Fourthly, it is hoped that learners can leave an excellent piece of art work for the OUC after the completion of the course. The completion of the course signifies not the end of the learning but a new start. The OUC will offer follow-up learning support in order to make the study of traditional culture sustainable.
Hu Yongmei from the OUC Xi’an Branch and Li Xiangxiang from the OUC Harbin Branch each gave a speech as representatives of the learners. On behalf of the tutors, Mr. Tian Xiaokang from the OUC Xi’an Branch recalled the teaching design and learning activities during the course and expressed how impressed he was with the learning results. President Huang Yan of the OUC Harbin Branch participated in the learning of the online course and made outstanding achievements as a member of the project team. At the completion ceremony, Huang Yan introduced the teaching organisation of the Harbin Branch, talked about his experience and inspiration, and summarised the exchanges and sharing at the completion ceremony.
Professor Tang Yingshan, head of the project group, and Doctor Xie Jun, a member of the project group for “Appreciation and Creation of Traditional Chinese Landscape Paintings Moodle Platform”, introduced the general situation of the operation of the online course and its achievements. This course is based on computers and mobile terminals. The course accumulated nearly 52,000 BBS posts, with an average of 4,000 daily Q&A sessions between the students and teachers. The completion rate for the course reached 76.9%. Such results demonstrate the breakthrough progress made in the pilot project of distance arts education, which embodies the OUC’s educational philosophy of “learning available anywhere, anytime for all”. The positive achievements made by the online course will act as a solid foundation and a major driving force for the project’s follow-up work, ensuring the smooth implementation of later offline learning classes.
According to Tang Yingshan, the applicability of the teaching content has laid a solid foundation for the students’ learning and the highly competent teaching support team has ensured the efficiency of learning. Additionally, the project team and the technical support team of the OUC Publishing Group have united to perform their duties, which has helped to guarantee the excellent results made by the online course.
The “Appreciation and Creation of Traditional Chinese Landscape Paintings Moodle Platform” project was approved in August 2017. The project aims to disseminate and popularise traditional Chinese culture and arts education via online platforms. It focuses on the “traditional landscape paintings” course with the aim of building a Moodle learning platform suitable for online learning and dissemination.
Students Being Conferred With Their Completion Certificates
By Xu Hang , OUC