Challenges and innovations in online teaching during the outbreak of COVID-19 in China

At the beginning of 2020, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spread quickly throughout China. For the health and safety of faculties and students, all schools and universities were required to postpone their spring semester; however, the Ministry of Education hoped that teaching and learning could be facilitated to decrease or even eliminate the negative impact of the postponement on the students' subsequent self-development. Taking the "Principles of Electric Circuits" course as an example, this paper presents an innovative online teaching scheme for fundamental engineering courses, including pedagogical design and interactive methods in lectures. The students' feedback was collected using delicately designed questionnaires and the results demonstrated that our online teaching scheme achieved an effect no less than that from traditional in-classroom teaching, with even better student interactions using the online networks.