Tonggengyuan - Chinese Courseware Makes Debut
The courseware project will encourage CLU students to learn and revise lessons without time or space constrains

Tonggengyuan team (from left to right): Syu Wei Bing, Lecturer; Wang Ai Kim, Lecturer; Dr Chin Kwee Nyet, Convenor, Chinese Language Programme; Cheong Lee Peng, Lecturer; Lou Yan, Instructor; Lin Chiung Yao, Instructor - Centre for Language Studies, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences

Tonggengyuan courseware is designed and developed as a one-stop virtual centre which not only supplement and enhance classroom learning, but also through animation and audio/visual exercises on, to motivate and encourage self-learning. This is achieved by introducing interactive elements, such as self-correcting exercises in the courseware. This allows greater learning autonomy for students, as they are able to access those materials anytime, anywhere.

Courseware Content

Despite total commitment from both CIT and CLU, developing Tonggengyuan is not without challenges. Due to the unique pictorial nature of the Chinese characters and issues of software compatibility, both team had to come up with creative solutions. The online exercise format were adjusted, using multiple choices instead of fill-in-the-blanks. Subsequent designs of related exercises were also time-consuming, as each Chinese character has to be divided into particles, before being scanned to make up the composition.

As a CLU instructor pointed out, there were little reference along the way, but they overcame the challenges admirably.

Tonggengyuan courseware is expected to make its launch in July 2002, in time for the new semester.

The courseware developers have also enable visitors to read the information in English.

Tonggengyuan e-classroom

The highlight of the courseware is the e-classroom. The e-classroom was conceptualised to emphasise the four language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities. Besides self-correcting exercises presented in various formats such as mix and match, multiple choice, games, audio, demonstration of Chinese character strokes, and recommended literature and cultural readings, other useful links are also provided, making Chinese language learning relatively complete.

Results

Based on the positive students' feedback and success of the E-daf and Bahasa Indonesia courseware projects, both CIT's developers and CLU instructors are hopeful that Tonggengyuan will not only enhance students' learning process, but will further promote Chinese language usage in the Internet world.