In a relaxed atmosphere, nearly fifty people have debated about the issue of digital in education. The host of this scientific breakfast was Mr. Renaud Edouard-Baraud, Director of L’Atelier affiliate to the BNP Paribas Group. During his presentation, he highlighted the role of a teacher before and after the era of the digital particularly on how now students can challenge their professors through this easy access of knowledge that the Internet offers. He also mentioned how it is easy today to deliver courses through the Internet. Indeed, this technology can be used by most of people in the world. Today, we can be a part of a distance course even offered by well-known universities such as Harvard or MIT. This last innovation named MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). This concept has been launched first in United States but has been quickly spread all around the world.

In China, MOOCs are just in the beginning phase and mainly focus on English course, an important added value to distinguish from others due to the student competition. The free aspect attracts a lot the Chinese people who are not ready to spend a lot of money in this kind of education. Even a video company named YY developed an interesting concept to bring people interest on Online Education. They decided to give money to people who ended a course and take money from people who give up.

Finally, this subject was really in the news and brought a lot of interesting questions from the audience such as are children still need to learn how to write? Or should they rather learn how to code? There are not yet answers but this are some aspect to take into account with the coming of more and more technologies in our daily life.

- Contributed by Elsa Bouzaglo, Academic Intern swissnex China