Chin-His Lin and Yuen Lien presenting at the workshop

Almost 95% of the Chinese courses in schools and universities in Southern California will be taught online only or using hybrid teaching methods, in the fall of 2020, so teachers all have an urgent need to master online teaching.
In response, the Education Division of Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Los Angeles (TECO-LA) and the Chinese Language Teachers’ Association of Southern California (CLTA-SC) hosted a professional development workshop on August 29 –on the topic Teaching Chinese Online: Curriculum Design Strategies and Useful Tools. CLTA-SC is an organization which serves hundreds of Chinese language teachers at all levels of education in Southern California. This was the first time it’s held a PD workshop online. 
Two online teaching and digital learning experts - Professor Chin-His Lin from Hong-Kong University, and Assistant Professor Yuen Lien, Director of the Mandarin Learning Center at Chung Yuan Christian University – were invited to be key speakers. Each has more than ten years’ experience of research in related areas, practical teaching, and teacher training. They shared valuable curriculum design strategies and explained and demonstrated how to use digital tools to teach online courses.
The workshop was open to CLTA-SC members and non-members and it attracted over 250 participants. Most were teachers based in the United State, but some also took part from Europe and Taiwan. The content is exactly what Chinese language teachers need to help them to better navigate the challenges posed by the current COVID-19 pandemic, and the workshop was extremely successful... The organizing team received an enormous amount of positive feedback and requests for more information afterwards. A video recording is being edited and CLTA-SC will share the link as soon as it’s ready.