The International Forefront Teacher Training Lecture Was Successfully Held

Jun. 12, 2016

During June 6th to 10th, 2016, the International Forefront Teacher Training Lecture, held by the RUC Smart City Research Center and organized by school of Information Recourse Management, turned out to be a success. Professor Bin Zhang, Dean of iSchool at RUC, Professor Hepu Deng from School of Business Information Technology in RMIT University, Professor Xiaomi An, Director of the Data Governance Study Room of iSchool at RUC, Wei Xu, Vice Director of the RUC Smart City Research Center, and some teachers and students from SIRM or other schools participated in the training.

Alem Molla, Associate Professor and the leader of green IT research team of School of Business Information Technology at RMIT University, was invited as the lecturer. He has ever been a lecturer at University of Manchester in the UK and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, and taught at Ethiopia Business School. And he ever worked for Telecommunications Bureau in Ethiopia, and once provided consultations for IDRC. Green IT, e-commerce, and informatics of enterprise system and development are Alem Molla’s research areas. He is interested in how digital innovation can promote sustainable development of enterprise’s business. Many of his papers were published on some top journals in the area of information system, e-commerce, and development informatics, which were cited over 600 times.

During this training, Alem Molla’s talking was mainly about digital innovation, smart city, and energy informatics, and attached importance to the case analysis of some current issues like electronic money, private cloud, smart grid and intelligent building. In this process, he introduced the basic concepts and research contents of digital innovation, smart city, and energy informatics, and analyzed some qualitative research methods, quantitative research methods, design research methods and application cases about cutting-edge research in detail. He not only introduced existing research findings, but provided cutting-edge research topics to be studied and future research directions, inspiring new awareness and interests of the present teachers and students. In the process of lectures, the speaker uses lectures, discussions, questions and other forms to guide and teach, using a variety of teaching methods and classroom response system, and video teaching to increase the participation and interaction of students and teachers here. The training sessions inspired attendants’ deep thinking and active participation.

After five-days training and learning, the training seminars successfully came to an end. Because of the inspiration and teaching of Alem Molla and Xiaomi An, faculty members and students of RUC benefited a lot. Through the promotion of awareness of digital innovation and energy informatics, expanding the understanding of smart city, they enriched perspective information science and related disciplines about innovative interdisciplinary research group, which can bring a lot research questions to think about. On one side, a new vision makes us think how the information and related disciplines group should promote innovative research and practice in the field of digital transformation and social transformation, innovation, and enhance the ability of the collaborative development of the subject. On the other side, with group cooperation, openness, proactive and innovative attitudes, how can information science and related disciplines face the global digital challenges, provide innovative and collaborative solutions for social progress and contribute to urban development. Digital innovation still continues, energy and information science are needed to be studied, and smart city develops sustainably. The world needs a multidisciplinary integration of collaborative innovation, and we look forward to more in-depth cooperation with outstanding scholars in the future on education, research and collaborative innovation.