BJUT renews ties with e-learning German faculty

On Sept 11, the Beijing University of Technology renewed a memorandum of understanding with the Hasso Plattner Institute, an information technology faculty at the University of Potsdam in Germany, continuing their cooperation and exchanges in the field of digital engineering, mass data analytics and internet security.

The Sino-Germany cooperation agreement can be traced back to Oct 29, 2002, when Christoph Meinel, the director of the HPI, delivered a speech in the German city of Trier addressing problems of internet and intranet security, while a group of Chinese students followed the lecture over the internet at BJUT.

The university is one of the pioneers of distance learning in China, receiving online courses from foreign institutes via the internet, according to Meinel, who now flies to Beijing every April to offer oral exams to participants on HPI's e-learning courses.

He says his annual visits to the university over the past 16 years have allowed him to witness the increasing open-mindedness of BJUT students, the upgrading of the facilities on campus and the rapid development of Beijing.

This exceptional form of partnership, named the China-Germany Internet Bridge, was initiated after the Beijing-based university found that the project-oriented structure of the curricula and teaching methods from the HPI would suit their students, and help then improve their practical ability.

"Germany's world-class engineering education could afford us useful lessons in reforming our traditional talent cultivation models," says Liu Gonghui, the president of BJUT. "The internet bridge has enriched our educational resources and helped us develop our international outlook, and that's why we want to renew the memorandum of understanding for a third time and facilitate further cooperation with the German institute."

Meinel says, "To record and transmit lectures is just the first step in global e-learning." He adds that he wants to build up a more social and interactive platform to spark people's interest in lifelong learning.

About 500 students at BJUT have attended professor Meinel's online courses and some of them have also applied for postgraduate or doctoral programs at the HPI.

Che Xiaoyin, 31, a BJUT alumnus, is hoping to obtain his doctorate from the University of Potsdam next spring with the help from his mentor Meinel.

He met Meinel at a symposium held at BJUT, where he served as a volunteer and gained the professor's appreciation, before traveling to Germany for further studies in 2012.

Che says many of his counterparts in Germany are free to run their own startups as the length of courses at German universities are relatively flexible.

"The German institute collaborates closely with enterprises to conduct scientific and technological projects while the domestic universities lean more toward imparting theoretical knowledge," says Che. "It's easier for me to fit in the needs of my career after I have established a theoretical base and grasped the practical techniques."

Che accompanied the German delegation－which included Dietmar Woidke, Minister-President of the Germany city of Brandenburg and Clemens von Goetze, the German Ambassador to China－on this trip to NJUT, and showed them around the hightech laboratories at his alma mater.

Woidke briefly introduced Brandenburg's academic strengths and expressed his eagerness to establish more international connections between the German state and the capital of China.