BEIJING, June 30, 2020 — A news report by China.org.cn on China’s remote graduation under COVID-19:

Graduation season is drawing near. However, with COVID-19 still lurking, most Chinese universities are yet to resume to normal. This has caused substantial obstacles for both graduation ceremonies and graduates looking for a job.

To cope with the situation, Chinese universities have turned to seek remote solutions. Universities in Shanghai, for instance, have held livestream lectures on social media platforms, and shared employment guidelines, as well as tips for interviewing. Recruitment introductions and job interviews have also moved online. Likewise, a university in Zhengzhou, Henan province held a VR exhibition for its design-majored graduates, making the exhibition accessible to more people. What’s more, the university opened a special channel for companies, so that recruiting teams could contact graduates for interviews after watching the exhibition.

Remote exhibitions and interviews have broken the limits of time and space. Some novel ideas are also used in graduation ceremonies.

Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, for example, has shown its humanistic side in this respect.

The university combined robots and livestreaming in their commencement ceremony. The robots each carried a screen, allowing graduates to witness and even experience the rituals of the whole ceremony from home. Since the graduates were not able to attend, these measures to some extent made it up for them.

The reasons behind this are worth considering. Indeed, the epidemic will eventually be over, and all walks of life will resume to normal. But to each individual student, graduation is an irreplaceable memory in life. A commencement ceremony is supposed to fulfill the students’ sense of ritual. Therefore, Chinese universities didn’t want these temporary challenges to disappoint graduates, and did whatever they could to give the graduates a proper conclusion of their college life. A student from the university said that he had found it to be an interesting experience.

With such facilitating measures, this graduation season is bound to be a special one for graduates.

China is able to make these efforts due to the proficient use of technology. The epidemic has presented challenges to all walks of life. But, remote communication tools and online-to-offline coordination – such as VR, live streams – have helped the social life to move on in an orderly and efficient way in the past few months. As China seeks to build “new infrastructure” featuring new technologies, such utilization attempts have been playing pioneering roles. Hopefully, when the epidemic is over, these technologies will still be valued in various fields, injecting vitality into people’s lives.

China Mosaic
http://www.china.org.cn/video/node_7230027.htm

Remote Graduations: Longer distance, more humanistic
http://www.china.org.cn/video/2020-06/30/content_76221641.htm