How to Build an American Classroom Environment in a Chinese Engineering College

The engineering education in China has made a lot of promising changes recently. The Chinese educators are actively aligning their teaching styles, course materials and utilization of available resources with the popular practices in the western countries (such as the US). The authors of the paper piloted a graduate course, Advanced Manufacturing Systems, in spring 2014 at Yangzhou University in China. An American classroom environment was simulated in this course. It was taught in English and covered a wide range of up-to-date manufacturing topics. It was also project-based and involved large amounts of in-class discussions. The student feedback was exciting. In this paper, the authors will introduce how the course was designed and taught. They will also share their plan for the future research.