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Gaining Laurels for Taiwan--NTU Teams up with Tutor ABC to Create a Global Digital Network for Chinese Language Learning

With the rise of the Asia Pacific market as well as China's rapid economic development, learning Chinese has become a worldwide fad!! According to the estimates of China's Chinese Language Council International, in 2010 there will be 100 million foreigners learning Chinese, whereas the Asia Society of the United States estimates that by 2015 there will be 750,000 American high school students studying Chinese. Facing a N.T. 2 trillion dollars market opportunity, NTU made a special effort to team up with TutorABC to create a global digital learning platform called www. ntuorming.com, and the signing ceremony took place on June 18th in the first conference room of the Administrative Building.

NTU has plowed the waves of Chinese learning for many years. To satisfy domestic and foreign needs for learning Chinese, Chinese dialects and Chinese language teachers, NTU offers a variety of Chinese language courses. In addition, NTU invented an exclusive Chinese language voice recognition system, which was employed at the Language Center of the College of Liberal Arts and the International Chinese Language Institute to offer workshops and training classes for overseas Chinese language teachers. All these efforts are geared toward making NTU the center of international Chinese language learning, and the leader of Chinese language teaching. President Si-Chen Lee said: "In order to entice people from all over the world to learn Chinese, speak Chinese and write Chinese, NTU has been mulling over the ways and means to increase our competitiveness, so that Taiwan can become the de facto leader of global Chinese language learning."

Addressing the issue of NTU's cooperation with TutorABC to create the NTUtorMing global learning network, President Lee stressed: " Through the most advanced on-line live learning platform, coupled with NTU's accredited faculty, teaching materials and our self-developed voice recognition system, and aided by TutorABC's professional and systemized management, we hope that we can share our gifted resources and teaching quality with the world."

TutorABC utilized the "Web 2.0 consumer-centered" concept to produce the "e-learning 2.0" on-line live learning interactive platform. In 2005 TutorABC acquired a national patent for its Dynamic Course Generation System(DCGS), which offered teachers, teaching materials and teaching contents to match learners' predilections, work scopes and language proficiencies. Moreover, through TutorABC's Learning Management System (LMS), every learning experience can be made more precise, and more befitting the needs of the learners.

NTUorMing global Chinese learning platform offers the distinguished talent pool of NTU's Chinese language teachers, as well as our pluralistic and intensive teaching materials. The unique and patented "voice recognition system" developed by Professor Lin-shan Lee of the College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is able to offer real time analysis of the learner's pronunciation, intonation, rhythm and volume and make instant corrections so as to improve the learner's speech pattern. As opposed to the traditional teaching method whereby the teacher controls the content and direction of the lesson, the NTUorMing platform allows the learners to take charge. By use of the internet, the learners can decide the time, place and frequency of the classes. At present the courses are offered from 6 a.m. in the morning to 12 p.m. midnight. In the future the courses will be offered on a 24 hour basis, so our global learners will not be constrained by their time zones.

Chinese version