About Us

We believe that broadband, wireless, real-time, interactive, and multimedia learning are the five features of competitive e-learning. In our experience, traditional real-time teaching needs to be integrated into web-based teaching – a lesson we learned from several years of practice. The web-based classroom provides reliable and interactive real-time multimedia teaching services, which on the one hand allows teachers to teach the way they are used to with convenient and easy to use facilities and on the other hand provides students with simple and efficient access to real-time digital learning materials.

The e-learning lab conducts leading research and promotes state-of-the-art technological application in the field of e-learning and teaching. It brings together researchers, engineers, students, teachers and scholars to investigate how to build an intelligent distance-learning environment based on the Standard Natural Classroom (SNC) paradigm, which includes multimedia content delivery, information retrieval and data mining technologies. Due to its expertise, the e-learning lab is responsible for the planning and development of the educational network platform of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The e-learning lab was established in 1995 by Prof. Ruimin Shen as an independent center of excellence at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), one of the top four universities in China. Prof. Shen is the Dean of SJTU’s School of Continuing Education, and is working in the Department of Computer Sciences of SJTU since 1991. He pioneered e-learning applications in China and received several national and municipal awards for his achievements. Today, the SJTU e-learning lab resides in the Hao Ran High-Technology Building, a state-of-the-art testing ground for technological applications at SJTU. The lab works on projects on municipal, national and international level.

The research conducted by the e-learning lab is internationally recognized, both in research and by industry. The lab has been funded by INTEL for 10 straight years. In 2004, it assisted the MIT in holding the MIT OCW 2004 Academic Conference. In 2005, it won the funds from NSFC and BT and hosted the NSFC-BT bilateral e-learning conference. In 2006, it hosted the Distributed Learning Conference 2006 sponsored by NSF. Furthermore, it has established extensive cooperation with universities in Japan, the US and Europe. Since 2009, the lab is consortium member of the EU FP7 project ROLE.

The e-learning lab is closely associated with the SJTU School of Continuing Education, SJTU’s distant college. Founded in 1999, today SOC has more than 26,000 students. Recently, SOC expanded its training department and now provides training to several large companies. Thanks to its large number of students, SOC serves as an ideal test-bed for the e-learning applications developed by the Lab.

The e-learning lab is welcoming your suggestions and interested in cooperating with you. Please contact us at nec@sjtu.edu.cn