Reporter: He Wenyi

On the evening of April 8, Mr. Neville Swartz held a lecture entitled “Education—Leading or Following?” in LeYu BuildingC108.

First of all, Neville asked the students what they thought of the learning situation in class. The students had a discussion on some common issues on learning such as, not enough interaction between the teacher and students, the lack of independent thinking of students and the low students’ participation. What’s more, Neville pointed out that the misuse of the cell phone in class bothered a lot. So, Were there any better ways for learning？Next, Neville showed a video about Professor Jim Taylor’s speech in a university at Hong Kong, which presented the idea that, online education could be an alternative of traditional education. In the video, Professor Jim Taylor’s concept”Blended learning” was interpreted with details on the disaccord of the increasing demand with the educational resources, explaining the urgent need to innovate the traditional learning.

Then, Neville made further efforts on analyzing the problems existing in learning. After he knew about the pros and cons of Gao Kao, similar to the western education, he made a conclusion that it was not entirely objective and fair to judge a student with a score of the exam. Therefore he approved of educational reforms by utilizing the modern Internet technology to build a better learning environment. At last, Neville introduced his learning website to students and recommended a free global online learning platform named” Moodle”.

In terms of everyone’s different learning preferences, there is still an inspiration tonight. Why not have a new try on the online learning?

Proofread by Zhang Wenhui