# Introducing individual Top Level Courses case studies


I interviewed five professors at two universities who have had their
courses selected as Top Level Courses. Below, I will briefly introduce
the courses, and in later posts, I will detail these professors'
experiences with course selection, and the impact of having been
selected.

An interesting finding from the interviews was that most courses had
been developed for a long time before they applied to, and were selected
as Top Level Courses. The macro-history of course evaluations in China
that was discussed in the previous chapter is here illustrated through
the personal histories of these individual courses, which often had been
selected as excellent university courses. Professor B1 began teaching
her course in 1991, when it was a voluntary course. Later it became
designated as an obligatory course. The teaching team constantly strived
to improve the course, applying to have the course recognized as an
approved course, and later as an excellent course. Finally, it was even
designated as a class directly sponsored by the Ministry of Education
(jiaoyubu zhuban ke, 教育部主办课).

Professor B2’s course was started by the same person who set up the
department where he teaches, a professor who was very well-known within
China. He proudly notes that the textbook written by this professor has
been published continually for 50 years, and had a huge national impact.
Since he was such a leader in the field, the course is still today
marked by his specific approach to the discipline, especially his
emphasis on connecting theory to practice. Professor B2 is one of the
students trained by him, one of many teachers in this department who are
his students, and is proud to continue his heritage through continually
developing teaching teams, teaching materials and courses. This course
also received the excellent course designation from the university,
before they applied to be a Top Level Course.

Both Professor A2, who began teaching in 1997, and Professor A1 have
also taught their courses for many years. Professor A1’s course is an
important obligatory course in the major, and one of the key courses at
the university. During the years of teaching, a lot of emphasis has been
put on developing teaching materials and course contents. Until 2007,
the course was entirely lecture-based, but since 2007, they changed to
include an internship where students can put their knowledge into
practice.

Many of the courses had also developed web resources before the Top
Level Courses Project. Professor A1’s course did not have an external
website, but he had put many course resources on a campus learning
management system (open only to registered students). Professor A2’s
example is interesting – his course is also open to students from the
Western province of Xinjiang, who come to the university as visiting
scholars. In 2004-2005, their demand for more online resources after
they had returned home provided the initial impetus to create a website,
where he slowly began putting up recordings and other material, together
with a discussion forum.

Professor B2 began developing a website for her course in 2001, which
contained courseware, questions, descriptions of experiments and other
teaching materials. Under a provincial program called the 151 Project
(151 gongcheng, 151工程), she and her colleagues also developed a
resource database, where they deposited a number of resources from the
course. They also received requests from other universities for access
to the materials, because the textbook mentioned above has been so
popular and widely known.

* * * * *

The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis "The Chinese National Top
Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote
Quality in Undergraduate Teaching" by Stian Håklev, University of
Toronto 2010.

-   [Download the canonical PDF
  version](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses/Haklev_Stian_201009_MA_thesis.pdf)
-   [Central page collecting all blog posts, many different download
  formats, and supplementary
  material](http://reganmian.net/top-level-courses)

* * * * *