CUHK launches first Chinese medicine MOOC course in English on Coursera
The Faculty of Medicine at CUHK launches the first Chinese Medicine MOOC Course in English on Coursera and Asia’s first Chinese medicine clinical evidence online portal which gathers studies from around the world.
While Chinese medicine has been widely authorised and practised around the world, there is no suitable platform to provide research data, related information or training. To cater for the international demand, a team from the CUHK Faculty of Medicine with a Western and Chinese medicine background has launched a Chinese medicine course taught in English with the international Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider Coursera.
Titled ‘Everyday Chinese Medicine’, the course on Coursera is available as a series of video lectures combined with animation and graphics. It helps learners understand basic theories of Chinese medicine such as ‘Yin-Yang’, and ‘Zang-Fu’, causes of illness, ‘seven emotions and six exogenous factors’, and diagnostic methods.
Over 1,700 people have enrolled in the course since its soft launch in late September, with the majority of students taking the course from the US, Canada and India. The first phase of the course teaches basic theory while the second phase teaches herbs, acupuncture, self-therapy such as food therapy, Baduanjin (a type of Chinese health exercise similar to Tai Chi), and integrative medicine. The production of the second phase is expected to be available in 2019.
In addition to the MOOC course, the team created the Integrative Medicine Clinical Evidence Portal, the first of its kind in Asia, which collected over 200 international medical clinical trials and systematic reviews of Chinese medicine categorised by intervention or by condition. They were translated into user-friendly synopses, which are found effective in promoting the uptake of evidence on effectiveness and safety among healthcare professionals.