China—With the COVID-19 pandemic still in tow, many Chinese students are struggling over their studies overseas. Some are stranded in their study destinations while some are having online learning in their homes in mainland China. Though it may seem like distance learning is convenient, almost all students face one difficult hurdle—websites are loading terribly slow as everything needs to pass through China’s “great firewall.” Thus, Tencent offered an app to change this.
The censorship apparatus by Tencent, Chang’e Education Acceleration was available on Apple’s app store last March. The app includes websites of 79 top US and UK universities. This app also has a selected list of overseas educational services in which resources such as SSRN, JSTOR, Stack Overflow, and Codecademy are in. There are also team collaboration tools, which include Microsoft Teams and Slack, as well as remote-learning platforms such as Khan Academy, Coursera, and UDemy, to name a few.
This is good news for Chinese students. They can use Chang’e in the country as it is not a VPN, rather a “scientific internet surfing tool.” When students open the app, they get to pick from eight different countries for acceleration, latency time, and expected increase in speed for each region. With this tool, Chinese students can enjoy online learning with no delays and hopefully complete their programs on time overseas.
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