Prof. Tao Yitao’s MOOC Honored National Online First-class Course

The MOOC course “Reality Economics” led by Prof. Tao Yitao of our center was acclaimed as the First Batch of National Online First-class Courses by the Ministry of Education. The Guangdong Provincial Department of Education reported and recommended the course, and it received this honor after the evaluation of domestic experts and publicity.
Reality Economics is a course with connotative interdisciplinary characteristics that takes economic theory as the main body and integrates philosophy and literary thinking, especially the education of outlook on life and economics teaching. It boasts the following distinctive features:
1. With the unique and novel teaching idea,  it starts with the story, and then return to reason and theory, interpreting theories through real life. It leverages economic principles to explain people’s choice behavior, and in turn utilizes the latter to evidence the former, which is very appealing to both refined and popular taste.
2. The teaching language is beautiful and vivid, forming a unique expression system of economics teaching language.  It enlightens people with wisdom and touches people with language. Therefore, the online interaction of the course is very active. The total number of student posts (an average of 30,000 to 50,000 per semester), the number of teacher posts and participants in interaction are significantly more than similar courses. Due to the novel online maintenance and interaction, unique methods and ingenuity, the “MOOC Practice” course of the University Open Online Course (UOOC) specifically interviews the course team, and many of its practices are used as the “Experience Interview” for reference in other courses.
3. The teaching content is rich and massive, with literature, history and philosophy complementing each other. With economic principles as the main line, it embraces philosophical thinking, depth of history and romance of literature, making a successful attempt to provide an economics teaching model and style with history and philosophy, literature and economics mixed together.
4. It incorporates the education and cultivation of thinking and virtue and outlook on life in the teaching of basic knowledge of economics, fully demonstrating the professionalism and moral realm of teachers.

In the six years since it was launched in 2015, the “Reality Economics” course has been generally loved and praised by students. The course was first launched on the Chaoxing platform (the predecessor of UOOC), and now it is running on the UOOC platform. The cumulative number of people who took this course, most of them came from 153 universities in UOOC, was more than 20,000, ranking second in the online courses. The course won the “Brand MOOC Award” of UOOC in November 2016. And it was recognized as a provincial-level boutique online open course by the Guangdong Provincial Department of Education in December 2019. In 2018, the supporting textbook Reality Economics co-authored by Prof. Tao Yitao and Wang Baowei was published by Shanghai Xuelin Publishing House.

(Middle front: Prof. Tao Yitao; right front: Wang Baowei, teacher of CCSEZR; left front: Zhang Xiaoqin, doctoral student of Prof. Tao; first from right back: Zheng Sijia, teacher of CCSEZR; second from right back: Ma Zhongxin, doctoral student of Prof. Tao; first from left back: Ning Yicheng, graduate student of Prof. Tao; second from left back: Wang Jiangbo, doctoral student of Prof. Tao; third from left back: Wu Jiaheng, graduate student of Prof. Tao.