Abstract: This paper aims at gathering information and identifying problems of online learning from students' experience in TCM colleges and universities during COVID-19 outbreak. During the first two weeks teaching, we conducted nationwide online questionnaires covering 24 TCM colleges and universities as well as several in-depth telephone interviews. We collected 135,598 valid questionnaires and 16 in-depth telephone interviews. The findings show that the dimension of students' emotional cognition scored the highest, while other dimensions like learning motivation, learning behavior, learning experience and learning satisfaction scored higher than the theoretical averages. Nevertheless, the dimension of students' past online learning experience scored the lowest, not reaching the theoretical average. The paper points out that the overall online learning in TCM colleges and universities is quite satisfactory. However, further improvements should be made in online-teaching design from the perspectives of providing learning sources, promoting teacher-student interactions, to improving autonomous learning. More efforts should also be made to adopt blended teaching mode thus promoting the implementation of teaching and education reform.

Key words: TCM colleges and universities, online learning, learner's experience, survey