Wu Chenggang, a 27-year-old doctoral student from the Institute of Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University, made his doctoral thesis defense on June 4.

But unlike most such examinations, Wu's was given a worldwide audience, as his defense was video-recorded and put on the Internet.

The process is part of a thesis defense project on edX, a popular Massive Open Online Course platform jointly established by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012. The organization started to work with Tsinghua University in 2013 when it started sharing online courses.