The winners of the 2026 WisdomTree Cup National Smart Curriculum Innovation Competition were recently released. The course  An Introduction to British Culture , developed by Zhao Guozhu’s teaching team, won the National Second Prize in the Smart MOOC Track. The entry stood out among 1,772 submissions from 435 universities nationwide. With the guiding principle of “Digital Intelligence Empowerment, Innovation-Driven Development”, the competition adopted multi-round reviews and conflict-of-interest avoidance rules to select winners, representing high standards of smart curriculum construction in Chinese higher education.

Open to all majors at TUST,  An Introduction to British Culture was awarded Tianjin Municipal First-class Online Course in 2021. In 2025, the team upgraded this traditional MOOC into a smart MOOC in partnership with WisdomTree. It constructed an integrated graph framework for knowledge, competence and teaching resources to solve typical pain points of online courses. Equipped with 25 intelligent tools covering teaching, learning, management, assessment and research, the course has recorded more than 35,000 AI interactions. Its self-built intelligent agent “British Mystery Box Machine” is highly popular on the WisdomTree Agent Square. Supported by platform data, the full-process digital assessment system forms a closed loop of learning, testing, diagnosis and targeted improvement.

This award demonstrates the School’s progress in educational digital transformation and AI-teaching integration, implementing the university’s 15th Five-Year Development Plan. Using this course as a pilot, the School has explored a practical path for the intelligent upgrading of foreign language courses and provided a valuable case for TUST’s AI plus education initiative. The School will further advance digital-intelligence-driven teaching reform, upgrade more courses, and support the development of TUST as a multidisciplinary, distinctive and high-level research university.