Beijing Jingshan School has developed a system of long-distance, computer-based learning to provide education to its students during periods of heavy air pollution, when schools may be forced to close.

Qiu Yue, vice-principal of the school, said work on the long-distance learning system began after the Beijing municipal government issued contingency plans for days of severe air pollution on Oct 22.

Beijing Jingshan School has developed a system of long-distance, computer-based learning to provide education to its students during periods of heavy air pollution.

According to the government plan, on days when official warnings predict air pollution to be Level 1, the highest level on the scale, schools should suspend classes but ensure that students can keep learning at home.

"We experienced class suspensions of more than a month in 2003 due to the SARS outbreak," Qiu said. "We were quite unprepared and simply stopped all the teaching activities for more than two weeks. We want to get ourselves prepared this time."

The school now has more than 3,000 students, ranging from elementary school to middle school and senior high.

Yu Feng, chief of the school's information center, is responsible for the distance-learning system. He said the system is based on the "education function" of Tencent's QQ group chat software.

"Students in each class already have a QQ chat group," Yu said. "What they need to do is to upgrade the QQ software on their computer to the newest version, where they can use the education function for QQ group chat."

The school put the system to the test on Saturday, with 15 teachers and 400 students from primary school and middle school taking part in a trial run.

Clicking the "video" button on the dialog box, a live image of their teacher appears on their screens, as captured through the teacher's video camera. Class interaction mostly comes from typing through the dialogue box, as many students haven't yet bought a microphone for the video class.

The education function also allows teachers to display teaching resources to the class, such as presentations created in PowerPoint software.

So far, the new system has not incurred any additional costs on either side, Yu said.

He Bing, a 34-year-old biology teacher at senior high school level, gave an online lesson to a class of 35 students on Saturday, the first time he had taken part in such a system.

There were no major differences in presenting the class, He said, although many students were more positive in asking questions via the online platform than they would have been in a real classroom.