SHANGHAI, February 17, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

Effective immediately, the German Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) is offering its free online courses in Chinese. On February 18th at 3:00 p.m. local time, HPI Director Prof. Christoph Meinel launched the first course of the new platform http://www.openHPI.cn at an event in the Chinese industrial metropolis of Shanghai. This learning platform is an offshoot of the social learning network http://www.openHPI.de, which was launched 2012 in Potsdam, Germany. With its approximately 100,000 registered users, openHPI has participants from more than 114 countries. Interactive courses are offered on current topics of information technology. Chinese now joins the languages used at present: German and English.

The first online course will be conducted by HPI founder Prof. Hasso Plattner, co-founder and Chairperson of the Supervisory Board of the software giant SAP AG. The course offers an introduction to the subject of the revolutionary main memory database technology known as In-Memory Data Management. All learning materials, such as lectures, self-tests, homework and exams, are available in Chinese; the English learning videos have Chinese subtitles.

"The Hasso Plattner Institute is pleased to be a pioneer of Massive Open Online Courses in information technology in the People's Republic of China," says Meinel. The openHPI.cn servers are at Guofu Data Cloud Computing in Shanghai, where SAP Labs is responsible for the support of Chinese participants in their native language. The learning materials are also translated there into Chinese. According to Meinel, Chinese online learners in all parts of the country will now be offered better technical quality with http://www.opnHPI.cn, than if they accessed the openHPI server in Germany. "I'm sure that our successfully functioning model will generate strong momentum for the offer of online courses in this populous country," Meinel said.

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