TLCP is a project that uses the internet to construct and share high-quality educational resources. These resources are organized as courses (including teaching materials, course plans, lesson plans, educational courseware, and lesson recordings), and must be freely shared with all Chinese universities for a set period (usually five years). When reviewing the quality of courses, emphasis is put on the educational philosophy、 teaching team, teaching materials, teaching methods and approaches, and teaching management and assessment, but the most important is the course's potential to serve as an inspirational example. Universities are also encouraged to choose courses where they have unique strengths.

XXX: 

Improve quality, part of quality project. Started out with course construction. Before the entire quality project. To evaluate whether the teaching at a university is good or bad, you always come back to the course, and what the teacher teaches in the classroom. Therefore we began focusing on this very early, in 1987 we began the university keystone course evaluation. The contents of the course evaluation were: quality of teacher, academic level of teachers, teaching team composition, and teaching content, also teaching materials. At that time, it was quite a simple process. 

In 1987 we began to evaluate the key courses in each discipline, the obligatory courses. We began in 1987, and in 1988 we regularized the process, and added a competition to become “excellent courses” (优秀课程). In 1989 we had already had some experience with evaluation, and decided to expand the process. In addition to the excellent courses, and the keystone courses, every course had to pass the “standard course” (合格课程）test. 

The standard test was very simple, a course had to have a standard teacher (or teachers), a syllabus, standard teaching material. So we wanted to get rid of those courses without a syllabus, where a teacher went all over the map. This was standardization of educational quality. 

We continued this evaluation system until 1992, then XXX province bureau of education began evaluating key point courses, and continued for almost ten years. In 2000, they began evaluating and selecting excellent courses, This was done for the first and last time in 2000. Our school had five courses that made the provincial excellent courses list. After this first round, they were planning to evaluate again after a year, but by that time, MoE promulgated the TLCP. 

The biggest difference between the TLCP evaluations system, and the previously existing ones were: it put focus on educational technology, ie. Developing internet resources, that was something brand new. The concepts of teaching teams, teaching contents, teaching methods, teaching principles, academic level of teachers, etc were similar to the previous evaluation methods, but with the added idea of sharing resources, which had a very important part in TLCP. 

XXX: 

Origin. MIT started after 2003, in 2003 we already had TLCP. Nothing to do with MIT. We started expanding education in 2000. From elite education to massification. But the problem was the quality. To expand quality, first we started with keystone disciplines, first it was 211 project, that was very large. A university centralized on making one major, one discipline. So the national keystone disciplines were evaluated.  I was a leader. But discipline is very big. Then we focus on TLCP, improve quality of individual courses. University - > discipline -> course. I was also participating in the keystone disciplines, I was responsible. We found out that discipline is not enough, we had to focus on courses.

The internet resources were not the most important, because internet wasn’t very developed at that time. Initially the application process was not so strict about the course website, that began changing in 2004, 2005. 

XXX:

 From 1999 MoE started online education pilot, then it was called modern distance education, 

How did it start? Not sure, was not there from the start. Like a ranking table, for courses. With Chinese characteristics. Began expansion in 1999. Too fast, not enough equipment or teachers. Society doubted the quality of instruction. Make universities care more about quality of instruction, and TLCP was just one of the ways.