“Jiangsu Management-Control Integration Experimental Teaching Center” was established in 2007 and was approved as a provincial model experimental teaching center by Jiangsu Provincial Education Department in the same year. The purpose of the center is, in theoretical teaching, to sort, refine and re-organize knowledge; in experimental teaching, to take the cultivation of the innovation spirit and capability as the main task of experimental teaching; while adhering to the cultivation of basic ability, to break the barriers between professional experimental teaching and laboratory construction under the condition of insisting on the cultivation of basic ability and, with the knowledge system of control theory and engineering as the basis and the knowledge system of management and engineering as the synthesis, to organically integrate the knowledge systems of these two disciplines in experimental teaching; to adhere to the educational concept of “taking students as the core and pursuing comprehensive and coordinated development in knowledge transference, ability cultivation, and quality improvement,” study the interdisciplinary experimental teaching ideas and methods according to the principle of “foundation - improvement - innovation” so as to promote the integration, optimization and sharing of experimental teaching resources, reasonably build hardware and software experimental equipment and experimental teaching teams, and focus on the cultivation of students’ abilities in learning, practice and innovation.
The center has broken the barriers between the experimental teaching systems of different majors and carried out the vertical management based on the concept of system engineering and the horizontal crossover and penetration of multiple majors and multiple disciplines. In so doing, the center has developed a two-level management system of school and faculty and has tentatively established a information management operation platform for laboratories to realize the computerized network management of experimental teaching, basic work information and instruments and equipment, and has improved the open operation policy and mechanism of the laboratories. It has not only realized the opening of laboratories of the same discipline, but also realized the mechanism of mutual opening of laboratories of related disciplines, so that students can design and conduct personal extracurricular experiments according to their hobbies and interests.
With the concept of “management-control integration,” the disciplines show the characters of having new courses, high comprehensivity and rapid renewal. In response to this, the center updates its experimental projects at a high rate, and the ratio of various projects can be appropriately adjusted to the specific conditions of students. Following their own interests and aspirations, students can select experiments under the guidance of teachers, design and conduct experiments independently, participate in teachers’ research and social application practice, or even apply for and independently complete the university’s “undergraduate innovation project.” All these are designed to broaden the students’ knowledge and help them master modern “management-control integration” technology and research methods, cultivate their scientific way of thinking, spirit of exploration, innovative consciousness and ability, and improve scientific literacy.
Nanjing University has always firmly established the concept of undergraduate teaching as the foundation and key to success in university education, and has established for talent cultivation the principle of “broad caliber, thick foundation, high quality, and valuing of innovation,” and has formulated a series of policies to improve teaching quality, strengthen practical teaching, reform experimental content, improve laboratory management, and expand laboratory opening and sharing. The university has also issued documents such as “Opinions on Strengthening Undergraduate Practical Teaching” for practical courses, and has formulated a series of policies and measures in experimental teaching, such as setting up professor’s posts and rewarding personnel with contributions to experimental teaching and laboratory management.
Over the years, under the guidance of the university and benefiting from the environment of its reform, the center has been engaged in the experimental and practical teaching reform, has boldly reformed experimental content, teaching methods, teaching and assessment methods in accordance with the training goal of technical talents of “management-control integration” compared with the traditional experimental teaching mode, and has formulated a complete set of experimental teaching and management assessment methods to ensue the quality of experimental teaching.
At present, the center has 21 experimental courses and 230 experimental projects, of which 104 are basic experimental projects, 90 are comprehensive experimental projects and 36 are innovative experimental projects, with comprehensive experiments accounting for 39% of the total number of experimental projects.
The center has studied the characteristics of all experimental courses, and in an effort to guarantee the quality of experimental teaching and meet the requirements of “management-control integration” for each course, it has ntegrated and combined traditional experiments for theoretical verification, so that a single experiment covers the content of several basic experiments in the traditional experimental teaching. This measure has strengthened the construction of comprehensive and innovative experimental projects. It maintains the experimental hours but directs special attention to the management and control of the teaching of large-scale systematic experimental projects with the intersection of two disciplines of management and control. At the same time, relying on SME’s research strengths and research achievements, the center timely transforms these research achievements into experimental teaching contents.