People can watch and listen to lectures from Fudan University, a prestigious Chinese university, when they click on the open class content on 163.com starting April 2011. This has set an example for universities across China to open online courses.

Online open classes from many elite foreign universities, such as Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Stanford and Princeton, have swept China. The current introduction of the online open class from Fudan University is also impressive.

The first professor that stepped on the platform of Fudan University's online open class was Fan-Sen Wang, vice president of Taiwan's Academia Sinica and a famous historical scholar.

The content of Wang's series lectures focused on the introspective method of thinking regarding history.

Officials said that lectures are one of the most important academic and cultural activities in educational philosophy at Fudan University. Lectures with refined content and cutting-edge topics are also conducive to the view exchanges of professors and students.

Reporters found on the home page and forums of Fudan University that the lecture resources of Fudan University are very rich, and there are more than 2,000 various lectures held in the university each year.

"We have accumulated about 500 video lectures over the past five years and we also plan to select some of the video lectures to upload and share on the Internet," said Fang Ming, deputy director of the publicity department at Fudan University.

"Despite the growing popularity of online open courses among white-collar workers, it will take a long time for domestic online open courses to really offer enormous social benefits," said Xiong Bingqi, vice president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute.

Xiong said that China has long promoted the development of high-quality courses at universities and putting them online. However, the utilization of the online open courses is unsatisfactory because some online courses come with dead links and some have not been updated for a long period. Therefore, domestic online open courses have a much lower influence than thoseprovided by top foreign universities. Related parties need to step up their efforts to improve the public sharing of university resources and the development of online open courses.

"To meet the challenges of the Internet era and globalization, it is necessary to reform the faculty evaluation, cultivation and goal setting systems," said Yan Chengzhong, NPC member and professor at Donghua University.

He said in addition to teaching styles and expressions, Chinese universities should also be more open-minded to share their high-quality courses that must have disciplinary features and keep up with the times so as to better undertake their mission of guiding social culture.