ZJUI ENG 100 Engineering Orientation is a special course for freshmen. Since 2020, ZJUI has launched a global Classroom exploration with this course as a pilot.
This course is “students coming together.” More than 200 ZJUI freshmen and more than 200 UIUC freshmen take this course at the same time. The 13-hour time difference and the large scale of students make the “global classroom” more significant.
This course “integrates China and the West.” The Chinese and American students discuss, exchange, and cooperate with each other in the group, giving students a real experience of “internationalization at home.”
This course “concerns the future.” It focuses on cutting-edge scientific research, expands engineering vision, and regularly invites academic and industry scholars and elites to exchange pioneering ideas and talk about innovation and entrepreneurship.
Prof. LI Erping, Assist Prof. HU Huan, and Assist Prof. Cristoforo Demartino are instructors leading this course. The course includes many modules, such as classroom teaching, seminars by senior scholars and industry elites, team projects, group discussions, etc. The students taking this course are very diverse. In addition to ZJUI undergraduate domestic students, there are also ZJUI undergraduate international students and UIUC undergraduate students. The diversified cultures from all corners of the world naturally meet and blend in the ENG 100 course.
Such a large-scale global real-time interactive and multicultural classroom is very rare in the world.” said Meredith Blumthal, director of international programs at The Grainger College of Engineering. “I tell colleagues around the country what we did, and they say ‘What?!?’ It certainly wasn’t easy, but we are really happy with the outcome.”
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Encounter the world: emphasize cross cultural communication, and the course features diversified interaction
"It is a very important way of learning to communicate harmoniously with people from different regions and cultures, and to learn and share each other's views in a critical manner. It is also an indispensable ability for students to grow into future global leaders. "As Assist Prof. Cristoforo Demartino said, this course attaches great importance to classroom communication and the cultivation of students' global competence and teamwork spirit. In addition to the guidance of the instructors, graduate students and teaching assistants also participate in it, support the interaction between instructors and students to the greatest extent, listen to students' opinions and puzzles, and jointly help the new engineering students to germinate innovative ideas and complete team tasks, so as to promote understanding and shorten the distance through communication.
Besides, the interaction between diversified students has also become the main theme throughout the course. The common team design project’s difficulty has been greatly increased for it relies on the cooperation of ZJUI undergraduate domestic students, undergraduate international students and UIUC students. Because of different cultural backgrounds and thinking modes, the voices in the team are more diverse. Different opinions and views vividly teach students the importance of critical thinking and seeking common ground while reserving differences. Dechnorachai Naruesorn, a 2020 undergraduate international student of ZJUI taking this course, shared with us, "Personally, I liked to work on a project with international team as it allows me to explore the differences in our thinking and communication. I also firmly believe that international cooperation is extremely important in solving global engineering challenges. "Although affected by the epidemic and jet lag, face-to-face discussion was not possible, the students remained enthusiastic about the project. Even if only for a short time, they would seize every opportunity to discuss and promote the project. "The biggest difficulty we encountered should be jet lag. Our team members are distributed in China, Iran, and the United States, so our communication time is basically fixed after 9 o'clock (Beijing time). We need to overcome the problem of fatigue at night. We have used all kinds of communication platforms such as ZOOM, Email and WeChat, and we have also deeply felt that 'the bridge of the network has connected us.' " WANG Jie, a 2020 domestic student of ZJUI, said. After constant adjustment and communication, they finally completed the project well, and everyone in the team felt a sense of achievement.
To ensure diversity, the course started this year with the practice of randomly assigning teammates, giving students more opportunities for cross-cultural communication. Through exchanges and cooperation with partners from all over the world, students can not only expand their international vision in an open and inclusive environment, but also promote team members to complement each other and make continuous progress in this community of equality, win-win, and inclusiveness. Time after time of discussion and exchange, time after time of intelligent confrontation, and time after time of joining in hands, students have the most real understanding and recognition of "building a community with a shared future for mankind."
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Explore the world: implement humanistic care and tackle problems with ZJUI solution
Engineering is a discipline that creatively applies scientific and mathematical methods and empirical evidence to innovate, design, build, maintain and optimize structures, machines, materials, equipment, systems, procedures, and organizations. To enable students to intuitively understand engineering and receive extensive interdisciplinary engineering education, team design projects run through the course. Assist Prof. HU Huan told us that the theme of the team project of the course was adjusted every year - from "From Technology Innovation to Business Success" in 2020 to "Human Centered Engineering and Global Collaboration" in 2021, In 2022, the theme is "Carbon neutrality and energy efficiency in a more livable world." No matter how the themes change, they will always be about guiding students to explore the world, pay attention to needs, activate creativity and embrace challenges.
ZHAO Zhijun, a 2021 domestic undergraduate of ZJUI, and his team are one of the teams that explore the world with humanistic care and focus on sustainable development. They start from daily life and work together to solve the problem of food waste in campus. This is ZHAO Zhijun's first cooperation with foreign students, for which he feels both nervous and excited. “During the process, I can learn more about how American students study and do their research and this could provide great help to me adjusting myself to the American learning style in my junior exchange year and long-term personal development.”
▲ “How to Handle Food Waste” by Samantha Linares, an undergraduate in UIUC
After the preliminary discussion, ZHAO Zhijun and his Chinese and American team-mates carried out campus interviews and surveys in Zhejiang University and UIUC respectively on the theme of sustainable development of their cafeterias. The interviewees from the International Campus and UIUC both agree that food waste is a matter of great concern, and further pointed out that bad food quality and unawareness of food waste are some of the major reasons why a lot of food gets thrown away. In the process of solving problems, team members also gathered ideas through many online meetings, formulated clear solutions and implementation steps, and finally put forward some innovative food waste improvement plans. More groups of students put forward innovative designs with originality through their own research and thinking, like "Optimization of Shared Bicycle Parking" and "Low carbon Solar Bus Design," etc.
“Engineers are like the backbones of the society, they make people’s lives easier and more comfortable by improving, inventing, and innovating, so engineers must do field research to find the actual needs of the people they’re designing for to build something that is beneficial instead of invalid designs. And this is where I believe I’m going to in the future: finding the needs, learning about the needs, and meeting the needs.” The inspiration and thinking shared by ZHAO Zhijun are also the original intention of the course. Hopefully, freshmen in ZJUI can truly perceive and understand the charm and infinite possibilities of engineering.
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Change the world: focus on cutting-edge science and technology, and talk with scholars and elites about innovation and entrepreneurship
As an applied discipline, it is also a compulsory course for engineering students to transform technological innovation into achievements and incubate into successful business models. In order to stimulate students' enthusiasm for innovation and entrepreneurship, and guide students to understand cutting-edge technology and industry trends, the course regularly invites senior scholars and industry elites from home and abroad to give excellent lectures in the field of engineering to students. Previously, ZJUI students have been given thought-provoking seminars by Mr. CHEN Liming, chairman of IBM Greater China Group, and Dr. Tan Don, IEEE member and former chairman of IEEE power electronics branch and Mr. PAN Jianqing, chairman of TDG group, and Mr. DONG Gang, the Senior Vice President and CSO of CSCC (Beijing) Financial Information Service Co., Ltd, and many other experts and scholars.
▲ The theme lecture of ENG 100
From the theme lecture, the students further felt the importance of innovation to the development of science and technology and enterprises, and further realized the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship of daring to be the first, pursuing truth, being brave to create, and being willing to contribute, which deepened the students' understanding of the significance of learning engineering knowledge, and inspired and expanded their vision and thinking.
In the "Global Classroom", instructors’ inspiring teaching and patient guidance, interdisciplinary project design, and wonderful lectures led by senior scholars and elites help students quickly capture industry trends, acquire engineering knowledge, expand engineering thinking, and improve interdisciplinary practical ability. Not only that, the instructor-student interaction and student-student interaction throughout the course fully mobilize students' enthusiasm for learning, improve the efficiency of classroom teaching and students' self-learning and mutual learning, helping students continually promote and explore each other in this course. The attempt to incorporate multiple students of ZJUI and UIUC into the same course also lays a solid foundation for further deepening cooperation between UIUC and ZJUI, enriching cross-cultural exchange experience, and improving the capabilities of internationalization at home.
"Global Classroom" is ZJUI's active exploration of the new mode of international higher education, and it is also ZJUI's solid step in building a world-class engineering education and research system with diversified innovation and integration of China and the West and building a new ecology of integrated innovation and development.
