Overseas students attend an online course offered by the Chinese cultural learning platform. [Photo/yangtse.com]

The online learning platform launched by Jiangsu province in early 2020 to help promote Chinese culture overseas despite the COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be welcoming and effective, local media outlets recently reported.

The platform offered a broad range of targeted courses covering subjects like arts, crafts, and food, benefiting more than 300,000 students from Chinese schools and language training centers in about 40 countries and regions.

For example, the Chinese Culture category consisted of 16 subjects, such as Chinese singing and dancing, classic poetry, paper-folding and paper-cutting, Chinese shadow puppetry, as well as homemade dishes in Jiangsu.

The Chinese calligraphy and painting category included subjects ranging from landscape painting and bird-and-flower painting to regular script, clerical script, as well as running script.

The Grand Canal category introduced students to historic sites and intangible culture in the five Jiangsu cities of Nanjing, Xuzhou, Yangzhou, Changzhou, and Suzhou.

A Hungarian student gives a thumbs-up to the Chinese cultural courses. [Photo/yangtse.com]

The platform enabled students overseas to resume their studies disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, winning a total of over 20 million likes on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

The platform also aroused great interest among domestic and foreign news agencies and educational departments, such as People's Daily, China News, Xinhua Daily, and the educational department of Andalusia in Spain.

International students learn paper-folding via the platform. [Photo/yangtse.com]