At 8 pm each night, Zhang Min, lecturer at the Yangzhou University School of Foreign Languages, sits in front of her laptop talking and smiling into the Web camera. Zhang is on a “date” with some 20 of her students, helping them to process material they’ve consumed in her online class. A scene like this might have been *unfathomable just one or two decades ago, but some experts believe this to be the future of the classroom.