The signing ceremony for contract renewal between FutureLearn, a British massive open online courses (MOOCs) platform and Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) was held November 12 at SISU. According to the contract, SISU would continue to provide worldwide learners with its high-quality online courses and easier access to its diversified courses.
During the ceremony, Li Yansong, President of SISU, said that, as one of the cradles of foreign language education in China, SISU would exert its advantages of multilanguage, interdiscipline and cross-culture, and seize new opportunities to play an active role in investing and developing MOOCs and online education, as well as in promoting shared higher education resources worldwide. SISU is looking forward to a deeper cooperation with FutureLearn to make itself a driving force in MOOCs development, culture transmission and resources sharing.
Simon Nelson, Chief Executive of FutureLearn, introduce that, jointly supported by 12 British universities, FutureLearn has been the first MOOCs service platform in UK. Having gone through the rapid development since it was established in December, 2013, the platform now has more than 9 million learners and 150 parterners. FutureLearn hopes to further develop the strategic cooperative partnership with SISU, which is one of the first universities in China to join its MOOCs family.
The cooperation with FutureLearn is crucial to the promotion of SISU’s MOOCs development. After SISU joining the FutureLearn partnership in 2014, its first international English course “Intercultural Communication” was available online in November, 2015, making itself the first online course in China and the third in Asia. Now the SISU-FutureLearn Intercultural Communication course has been launched for 7 rounds, attracting more than 50,000 learners from more than 190 countries.
During the process of deepening the comprehensive reform, SISU actively promoted the integration of information technology and education reform, attaching great importance to the MOOCs development. In 2018, SISU’s open online courses “Short Stories in English” and “Selected Readings of Modern and Contemporary Japanese literature” went live in famous Chinese MOOCs platform, and “Chinese Traditional Phonology” and “Culture of Traditional Chinese Festivals (in Spanish)” were launched on the“Chinese University MOOC“ platform on Nov. 15.
