The Taipei City Government, in cooperation with the Overseas Community Affairs Council, has launched a special program to share the resources on the city’s online learning database with overseas Taiwanese.
The city set up the Taipei CooC-Cloud database in 2016 to allow students to learn by watching online courses, but the number of users had been growing slowly, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday.
However, when the COVID-19 pandemic delayed school openings last year, the number of registered users increased by about 400,000 to more than 500,000, and the number of clicks on the database contents rose by about 19 million, he said.
Photo: CNA
As the database has more than 11,000 video clips, and has access to 21 online databases and more than 460,000 books, the city government believes that its contents should be shared with more people, Ko said, adding that the city is cooperating with the council to promote the database to people in other countries.
Overseas Community Affairs Council Minister Tung Chen-yuan (童振源) said the council is grateful to see the Taipei City Government willing to share its resources in the database with Chinese-speaking schools around the world.
There are 1,054 such schools in the world, with about 25,000 teachers and 380,000 students, he said, adding that the program can benefit the students and allow the world to see Taiwan’s education system.
The program hopes to establish a special area in the database with selected videos suitable for students at the schools, encourage more to attend e-teaching courses and give classes in the database, Tung said.
It also hopes to assist schools in Taiwan to establish International Companions for Learning relationships with overseas Chinese schools, he said.
The council would also encourage teachers at overseas schools to help teach Mandarin to migrant workers in Taiwan, Tung said.
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
A bipartisan group of US senators has introduced a bill to enhance cooperation with Taiwan on drone development and to reduce reliance on supply chains linked to China. The proposed Blue Skies for Taiwan Act of 2026 was introduced by Republican US senators Ted Cruz and John Curtis, and Democratic US senators Jeff Merkley and Andy Kim. The legislation seeks to ease constraints on Taiwan-US cooperation in uncrewed aerial systems (UAS), including dependence on China-sourced components, limited access to capital and regulatory barriers under US export controls, a news release issued by Cruz on Wednesday said. The bill would establish a "Blue UAS
RSS