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1.INTRODUCTIONApplied optics in College of Optical Science and Engineering of Zhejiang University became a National Excellent Course in 2007, and a National Excellent Resource Sharing Course in 2016. All of our teaching resources including videos, PowerPoint files, flash files are also uploaded to the website http://www.icourses.edu.cn, and we have built the online test database at the website http://opt.zju.edu.cn/appopt. We raise up the teaching level of Applied Optics with the development of online education in the world, especially with the springing up of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)1 and the Small Private Online Courses (SPOCs)2. Now we were already in the era of “post-MOOC”3. In the project of optical education reform named “Sharing courses for the discipline of optical engineering in China” supported by the Sub-division of Teaching Guidance Committee of Education Ministry of China for the Engineering of Optics and Photonics, we have implemented as SPOCs for 3 years. In this project the main idea of teaching is still the constructivism learning theory put forward by Dr. Jean Piaget (1896-1980). He emphasized the activity of learners. In this theory, learning is considered as a constructive procedure based on the learners’ original knowledge and experiences, and is completed in social culture interaction. This theory has been implemented in many courses4, and we presented our Online to Offline (O2O) teaching model based on the theory last year5,6. O2O teaching is implemented in many aspects. In this paper our focus point is put on the O2O discussion and group works. How to design the discussion, how to design the group works, and etc. This is connected with the idea of raising up the students’ personality, such as critical thinking, cooperative and sharing spirits, communication and expression capabilities. In the future, the globalization is a general tendency. Our students will work together with the partners comes from different cultural backgrounds. We hope that their inter-cultural communication abilities will be trained by the discussion and group works. It is much more important or has much more significant for the students in their career than only learning a course. 2.DISCUSSION DESIGN AND TYPICAL QUESTIONS2.1The idea and strategy of discussion designHow to design the discussion, in our opinion it is based on the theory of Collaborative Learning or Synergetics that was put forward by Dr. Hermann Haken (1927-)7. According to this theory, all systems in nature where there are life are open systems composed of many individual parts which interact with each other and can form spatial, temporal or functional structures by self-organization. The competitive, collaborative and symbiotic relationships exist at the same time. The discussion design includes 2 parts, the first is to design the questions for discussion, and the second is to design organization style of discussion. The latter is also a part of group works, so we will describe it at the next chapter. Using Haken’s theory into teaching, the questions for discussion are designed according to the following:
The questions are put forward continually with the learning progress on the website. 2.2Examples of typical questionsAccording to the idea and strategies above, we give some typical questions for discussion as following:
As shown in figure 2, a study group is in discussion 3.GROUP WORK AND ORGANIZATION3.1Programming and presentationProgramming ability is very important in research of every field. Now optical design software is used widely, but it is helpful for the students of optical engineering to understand how to develop the optical or ray tracing software. Although they do not always work in the field of optical design, programming is a kind of activities for training computational thinking, and it is beneficial for them to do all sorts of work. Applied optics is available for training computational thinking, so we encourage the students to develop a simple paraxial ray tracing program, finding focal length or calculating cardinal point positions, when they have studied the spherical optical systems and perfect optical systems. This work is completed by 2 students as a small group. Every small group present the program in the large group, and then the large group selects a small group as the representative to present the program in the class, as shown in figure 3. Another small group work is to measure the focal length of a mobile camera. The work includes analysis of the errors. This is also completed by a small group of 2 students. The group works promote successfully the team spirit of our students. 3.2On duty in QQ chattingIn order to enhance the cooperation and sharing consciousness, we have established QQ group for chatting in each teaching class, in addition to offline discussion, the students are also encouraged in QQ group to ask their own questions. Some students often think their questions are too simple, and afraid to be laughed at by others, so they prefer to chat privately with the teacher to ask questions. After answering, we teachers encourage him to ask the same questions in QQ group and give the answer. This help them to set up self-confidence. Each teaching class has a large QQ group, at the same time we divide the students of each class into 5 or 6 study group, and let them on duty in the QQ group weekly. Every week the group on duty must ask some questions for the students to discuss. This allows students to pay attention to their own learning problems and often ask some questions that are concerned commonly. These group works raise up the responsibility of each student. 3.3Flipped class and role switchingAs written above, the students in one class are divided into about 5 study groups, corresponding to 5 kinds of aberrations: spherical aberration, coma, astigmatism and field curvature, distortion, and chromatic aberration. When studying aberrations, the students in one group self-study one or two kinds of aberration by watching online video, and then make a presentation to all of the students in one class as shown in figure 4. After the presentations, we give them a test about the aberration concepts and calculating using known data. The average score of each aberration will be tied to the corresponding group score. Figure 4.Flipped class: a representative of a study group is making his presentation about distortion  This work flips the class and makes a role switching between the teachers and students, gives the students the chances to experience as teachers, and the chances to train their expressing abilities. Their presentation must be understood by others so as to obtain a good score for their group. In our evaluation system, the scores of discussion and group works take a 15% proportion in the total score. The group leader will assign the group score to every member according to the member’s contribution to the group activities. 4.CONCLUSIONTill now the O2O discussions and group activities have been implemented for 7 years, and the new improvements have been made every year. The questions for discussion can come from students, but mainly condensed in the teaching process in many years, so the teacher must give more energy in teaching with good vocational spirit. As a result, the students have made remarkable progress in expressing their opinions, respecting others’ opinions, raising up the selfconfidence and cooperation spirit, undertaking the team task, expressing ability and so on. In a poll last summer the students tended to give positive evaluation about themselves, and 92% of the students were willing to take the team work, and 97% of the students were satisfied with their group leader. In the subsequent short summer term, they paid more attention to optical design practice than before. 5.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTAll the work in this paper is supported by the project of O2O Teaching Reform of Zhejiang University, the Sub-division of Teaching Guidance Committee of Education Ministry of China for the Engineering of Optics and Photonics (Sharing courses for the discipline of Optical engineering in China) and the project of Education Ministry of China (National Excellent Resource Sharing Course). REFERENCESTu, C. H., McIsaac, M., Doyle, R., Aydin, H. and Ozkul, A. E.,
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