On the morning of July 13th, Beijing Headquarters of the NewClass hosted a group of energetic Singaporean guests from the Confucius Institute, Nanyang Technological University (CI-NTU). They were students majoring in business translation and interpretation, using the NewClass Simultaneous Interpretation Laboratory for interpretation training. This visit to the NewClass is a process of experiencing the birth and perfection of information-based teaching products.
As a R&D enterprise, the NewClass has devoted more than 20 years to teaching products and has repeatedly pioneered the digital education products in the new technology development stage. Through on-site visits, the students can have a more intuitive and comprehensive understanding of the development of teaching application brought about by technological transformation. This visit can be regarded as a beautiful episode for the students’ exchanging and learning at the Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation of Beijing Foreign Studies University.
In the demonstration environment, Ms. Hu from the Marketing Department of the NewClass explained the company's development history to the guests and took everyone through the technological transformation of interpretation learning by a vivid description combined with real objects. Having had a preliminary impression of the education information industry, they turned into a in-depth thinking and discussion on products and applications.
While tasting delicious fruits in the conference room, everyone exchanged ideas about enterprise development and products during the tea break. Dong Liang, Deputy General Manager of the NewClass, answered questions from the perspective of company development and introduced the process of new product establishment, research and development, and productization by taking NewClass remote products as an example. The unique education system has a long period from development to deployment to the classroom because it aims at schools. It can be officially launched only when the teaching needs are fully understood, and the products' stability is guaranteed. It is also a foothold for the development of the NewClass for more than 20 years.
After that, the NewClass engineers gave professional explanations and demonstrations on the functions and teaching applications of interpretation products. In order to be helpful to the guests' study, the technical engineers demonstrated the functions from the perspective of interpreters and combined them with real training scenes which not only aroused everyone's resonance and active participation but also made everyone realize the role of NewClass in improving learning efficiency with teaching. The NewClass engineers started visual simultaneous interpretation training. After a short period of tension, 'interpreters' quickly adapted to human-computer communication. Everyone was excited and tried to interact in real-time. Some were exploring the teaching modules, and some were suggesting adding beauty mode to cameras. Some were paying attention to their 'photogenic' works and take pictures at the screen with their mobile phones, and some were discussing face recognition, classroom practice records, homework, lecture training, copyright, and portrait rights. The function of visual simultaneous interpretation training can not only make everyone understand the functional design of NewClass, but also encourage students to discover the loopholes in the learning process. It encourages students to 'self-enhance' and corrects the pronunciation, intonation, and behavior defects as soon as possible.
During the half-day communication, with the excellent explanations, exciting interactions, and bold creativity, the guests felt a far-reaching influence of technology on interpretation learning in relaxation and pleasure and also understood the connotation of NewClass's unremitting pursuit of the concept of 'Learning Technologies Applicable in the Real World.'