By Wei Gu

I have been teaching Chinese for three months since arriving in Edinburgh during September 2020. It has proved to have been a challenging yet interesting job for me. As a new member of the SCIBC team, what has impressed me the most is the global reach of our CI.

In this semester, we have provided various online courses at a variety of levels. At first, we expected all the registrations to come from the three Heriot Watt University Campuses, Edinburgh, Dubai and Malaysia. However, we have seen a number of people outside of Heriot-Watt signing up for our courses. We have been surprised at how far away they have been and have included students from India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Spain, Russia, etc. It has been interesting to see the diverse social backgrounds of our students, which ranges from teachers to students, senior citizens to teenagers, and Chinese enthusiasts to Chinese majors. They are all very keen to learn Chinese and I have been delighted at how interactive the students in my classes have been. Although the Covid-19 makes the world a little bit strange, online teaching provides us with new opportunities to extend our business worldwide. The more people know about the SCIBC, the more popular our classes become. We firmly believe that our CI will remain globalised in the future.