While online courses from HarvardX have reached more than half a million students globally, less than 1 percent of the participants are in China. Technology and culture may be partly to blame for the low early enrollments. YouTube and other popular social media sites are banned there. English courses offer Chinese subtitles, but primarily cater to audiences familiar with Western, liberal arts approaches to learning.

Starting Oct. 31, a new HarvardX course on China hopes to reach into the Asian nation by thinking like a local. Delivering a mix of history, politics, and philosophy, the team behind the ambitious course is doing as much to make Chinese civilization accessible to those who have never set foot in the world’s most populous nation as it is to garner interest among its residents...

ChinaX is, however, going beyond just expanding access to knowledge, a tenet commonly associated with MOOCs, and instead pointing toward to a grander mission of intercultural understanding.

“We are on a path to make Harvard’s knowledge truly global,” said Robert A. Lue, faculty director of HarvardX. “This is not just translation, but transformation. I really applaud the efforts by the ChinaX team to reimagine everything.”...

Bol and the ChinaX team continue to harness technological innovations to improve the educational experience of knowledge-hungry students, be they in Harvard Square or Nanjing, Jiangsu province.

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