Editor’s note: In response to the latest COVID-19 outbreak in Beijing, Peking University (PKU) recently took effective anti-epidemic measures in compliance with the official zero-COVID strategy. The measures include remote teaching, regular nucleic acid testing, and closed-loop management. To minimize Omicron’s impact on campus, many faculty and staff members have volunteered to stay on campus to better do their jobs, sacrificing time with their families.

#PKU ‘guardians’# is a featured series on stories of selfless PKU staff and teachers who stay on campus to fight against the epidemic. Today, let’s meet Fan Xuesong, director of the Micro-Computer Lab  of the PKU Computer Center.

Peking University, June 14, 2022: With the adjustment of teaching methods, attending online sessions in school computer classrooms has become one of the new ways of taking classes. Fan Xuesong, the director of the Micro-Computer Lab of the PKU Computer Center, is responsible for checking the equipment in the computer classroom to ensure that everything is working properly, as well as communicating with the lecturers to ensure that the online-classes proceed well.


As the final season approaching, computer classrooms need to support the computer-based tests of 27 courses. Therefore, the staff must adjust the system and test the network before the exams, as well as inspect the exam and help the students to solve any potential mechanical problems.

Fan admits that taking care of 600 computers in eight classrooms by himself was quite disconcerting at the very beginning. In order to enable the students to find the staff immediately once caught up in a problem, he left notes with his phone numbers on the door of each floor’s office. “I've received over 50 calls in total, the most of them are from students who left their student ID cards or phone chargers in the computer classrooms. I'm quite relieved to know that no urgent technical problems have arisen so far.”Thanks to his careful preparations, the computer-based teaching and examination attended by nearly 3000 students were all successfully completed.

Aside of his primary responsibility, Fan has evolved into a "multi-tasker" during the anti-epidemic period. He assisted his colleagues who had to work from home with tasks that need to be completed on campus. These include reporting his colleagues’ coronavirus test results, helping them to debug the remote system, handling the financial procedures, and disinfecting computer classrooms and restrooms. One positive side effect is that he didn’t need additional exercise because he walked “20,000 steps per day on average, just rushing around in the building" to complete the above tasks.


Securing the teaching work in the Computer Center is only part of Fan’s job. His colleagues and he, who stay on campus, are all very busy from day to night solving problems related to the PKU network and computer system. And those who work from home are also very busy. The success of PKU online teaching can only be achieved with the close cooperation of every staff involved, both online and offline. According to Fan, not only has the online teaching been successfully ensured thanks to everyone’s effort, but they have also converted the period of epidemic a critical moment for the informatization of the university.

Fan’s contribution to the fight against epidemic isn’t limited to the university. He is now utilizing his professions to secure the online grading system of the Chinese subject for this year's Gaokao in Beijing.

Writer: Li Yangyang
Editor: Ye Yimeng
Source: PKU News (Chinese)