China-offers-global-students-free-online-courses-amid-Covid-19-epidemic

BEIJING: China launched an international online teaching service Tuesday, offering 193 online college courses for global students for free amid theCovid-19 (coronavirus) disease epidemic.

Entitled iCourse, the online teaching service was established under the guidance of China’s Ministry of Education.

A total of 60 high-quality Chinese universities and colleges have uploaded their courses in fields including medicine and epidemic containment, economics, natural science, art, engineering and agriculture to iCourse.

Sharing a pilates mat, brother and sister Mykhailo and Maria Bondarenko practise basic yoga moves at home, following the instructions of a trainer via laptop.

They are on a course run by Education Hub and aimed at Ukrainian children aged seven or younger, now under lockdown with their parents following the closure of all schools as part of measures to contain the coronavirus outbreak.

“We wanted to create a project which would help parents to get a bit of free time for housekeeping or work as many people moved to remote work,” the Kiev-based organisation’s director Mariya Boguslav told Reuters.

“It is very hard to work with little troublemakers of four to six years old around.”

As well as yoga, its ‘Online Kindergarten’ series offers English and drawing lessons, and courses on developing memory, imagination and concentration.

New webcasts – including some featuring showbiz stars – are posted every day and the site attracts up to 30,000 visitors daily. Boguslav said around 100,000 people registered in the first hours after the initiative launched.

The service will update more courses of different themes according to the feedback of overseas users. – Xinhua/Asian News Network

Originally Publish at: https://www.thestar.com.my/news