Shanghai Jiao Tong University has put the video lectures to 42 of its courses online as part of a global initiative to give the public free access to high-level higher education, the Youth Daily reported Wednesday.
The videos, known as Open Course Ware, allow anyone to learn from professors at one of the city's best universities via its online school, called Nanyang Academy.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University has been sharing course materials with the public through the online course center on its website since 2006, though those materials were only digital documents, according to a university press release.
The development of the Internet and smartphones has broken down barriers to knowledge, Huang Zhen, the university's vice president, said in the school's press release.
The university is the first higher education institution on the Chinese mainland to join the Open Course Ware Alliance, an initiative started by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that prompted universities around the world to share their courses on the Internet.
MIT established the Open Course Ware Alliance in 2005, which attracted more than 200 universities in 48 countries and regions.
The growing demand for online courses indicates that online courses will become a mainstream source of knowledge in the future, Huang said.
MIT and Harvard University launched an online course platform called edX in May 2012. About 370,000 people registered for the platform's first batch of courses. More than 2 million people have registered for an online course platform established by Princeton University, Stanford University and other 30 universities in April 2012.
Over the next 10 years, Nanyang Academy plans to make Open Course Ware for its entire catalogue of more than 3,000 courses. The academy's courses are available at ocw.sjtu.edu.cn.