Primary and middle schools in the city of Zhoushan, East China's Zhejiang province, started to hold online courses for more than 89,000 students on Feb 10.

In order to prevent local students from catching COVID-19 while maintaining educational activities, the city's bureau of education has been urging schools under its jurisdiction to prepare online courses for their students in recent days.

According to the bureau, schools were allowed to design their own online education modes and teaching plans.

On Feb 10, a 15-minute-long math lesson for fourth graders developed by a teacher at Putuo Primary School in Putuo district was issued on an online educational platform. Students at the school were required to watch the lesson and answer questions in a mini-test after finishing the online viewing.

"We have been preparing for the online course for a couple of days with the help of the computer technicians at our school," said Zhang Zhuhong, a math teacher at the school who contributed to the preparation of the lesson. "I think the first class was quite a success because the students scored high on the mini-test."

Things were different at Zhoushan Primary School. Sheng Tingting, a math teacher at the school, said that she held an 18-minute-long live online class, assigned homework after it and asked her students to submit the homework through QQ, a Tencent-operated online communication program.