On the evening of October 3rd, 2021, Houston International Institute held the Guidance of Introduced Courses for 2021 freshmen via Tencent Meeting. Dean Zhang Jinlei, vice-dean He Jiantong, teaching secretary of Mechanical Engineering Wang Zhaogui, teaching secretary of Electronic Engineering Huai Shuaiheng, teacher of Civil Engineering Ma Jun, relevant personnel of the Academic Affairs Office and Work Office of the HII and all 2021 freshmen participated in the course guidance meeting.
In her speech, Zhang Jinlei quoted president Xi Jinping’s words to young college students, “The young people should cherish time to learn, seek truth and knowledge, practice skills, win glory for the country and benefit the people”. This sentence reiterated to freshmen that learning was the top priority for college students. She hoped that the students would adapt to the pace of university learning, grasp all the instrumental resources provided by HII, and make reasonable and efficient use of their time to study. Due to the impact of the epidemic, she stressed that the introduced courses this semester would continue to adopt the method of “online teaching plus offline assistance plus online and offline parallel Q & A session”. The purpose of this guidance was to help freshmen get better understanding and adopt to this teaching method.
(Fig. 1 dean Zhang reiterated that learning was the top priority of college students)
Wang Zhaogui and other three programme principals and assistants elaborated on the key points and difficulties in the learning process of the introduced courses “Introduction of Engineering” to the freshmen. They pointed out that the teaching contents and teaching methods of the introduced courses were different from the traditional ones. They would use investigative, heuristic, interactive, discussion-based and mixed teaching methods to improve the teaching output. Meanwhile, they paid attention to the process assessment in and after class, attendance, daily homework, periodic test, classroom performance, team homework and the final examination. They were all indispensable parts of the holistic course assessment. Teacher Wang showed to the students how to log in to BB class of Dalian Maritime University and download necessary software such as MATLAB, Office Suite and so on. Through the careful guidance and experience of the three teachers, the freshmen had got a preliminary understanding of the learning methods of the introduced courses.
(Fig. 2 Teacher Wang Zhaogui introduced the learning points to the freshmen）
At the end of the meeting, Zhang Jinlei, He Jiantong and other three teachers answered the questions raised by the students one by one, hence the students had a clearer understanding of the upcoming introduced courses.
Houston International Institute attaches great importance to the work on freshman entrance education. Every year, it would organise class advisor meetings, professional guidance and other entry-level education to answer questions and solve doubts for freshmen, which can help them better integrate into the new environment, start a new journey, plan their university learning career and bloom the flower of youth at the stage of DMU.
