Elderly students find new treasure in online classes
Print Edition
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, Tang Keli, 71, is enjoying his time indoors taking livestreaming vocal music classes every week. Online learning is becoming a trend for many elderly students in China.
“Online classes are really a treasure. I never knew that there is such convenient technology,” said Tang, a student at Shandong University for the Aged in eastern Shandong Province.
Spirited, with a sonorous voice, Tang does not look like a man in his seventies. He has been taking three or four classes online every week since March, and each class takes about one hour. After the class, he uploads videos of his practicing pieces as assigned by the teacher.
Tang said that he used to take a half-hour bike ride to the university, but now he saves on commuting time while getting more constant responses from the teacher and replaying the online classes on the computer for reviews.
“My wife also takes a photography class online. My grandson is also taking online classes and we even use the same livestreaming platform.”
Zhou Jun, a yoga instructor who has been working part-time at the university for 12 years, said that she was told in mid-February to teach classes online for the spring semester. “I didn’t have enough confidence to do so because I never tried livestreaming,” she said.
In order to complete the unfamiliar task, Zhou changed the furniture layout at her apartment to make room for yoga livestreaming and prepared the opening words to help students concentrate on the class.
Zhou now teaches five classes with over 170 students, aged between 55 to 70. Some students are quite new to livestreaming app and even smartphone functions, but Zhou is patient and teaches these gray-haired students how to use their phone and the livestreaming app.
“The new semester should have begun on March 2. We have over 730 classes and about 20,000 students, 90 percent of whom are aged between 60 to 80,” said Zou Chunxiang, director of the educational administration office of Shandong University for the Aged.
Now over 580 classes have gone livestreaming, and the elderly students have welcomed the change. However, there was not such a “technological dividend” to keep people’s life on track during a public health crisis decades ago.
In 2003, when Zou started her work, the SARS outbreak ravaged the country, and many schools had to postpone their new semester for half a year. Today, the Internet and smart devices have broken the limitation of time and space to help people take classes and acquire knowledge at home.
“Livestreaming classes can satisfy the elderly’s curiosity for knowledge as well as their eagerness to fit themselves into modern society,” Zou said.
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