HPI director Christoph Meinel gave the first Internet-transmitted lecture as a computer science professor at the Trier Institute for Telematics on 29 October 2002. The lecture, held in front of German students, addressed the topic Internet vulnerabilities and attack points ("Weaknesses and targets"). Chinese students, in a lecture hall at the Beijing University of Technology (BJUT), also followed Meinel's lecture projected live on a screen via the World Wide Web. "It was extraordinary because for the first time, students in the People's Republic of China were taking part in online courses at a foreign university," recalled the teleteaching pioneer, who in 2004 became the director of HPI, where he continued the cooperation with China.

Several years ago, Meinel made the transition from offering the Internet lectures via live stream to recording and then uploading them to a UT Beijing server. As a result, Chinese students no longer need to download a lecture from the HPI server in Germany. Once a year, after the end of lectures, Meinel flies to the Chinese capital where he is involved in consulting as well as holding oral exams for the lecture participants. Those who pass receive a certificate from the University of Potsdam.

When the ten-year existence of the Internet Bridge to the "Middle Kingdom" was celebrated, Meinel's colleague Prof. Baocai Yin was among the Chinese guests. He was dean of the computer science faculty at BJUT in 2002 and also one of those responsible for setting the teleteaching collaborative work in motion. He also led the information and communication technology team for the Olympics in Beijing in 2008.

Over the years, the HPI has greatly expanded its collaboration with China. A branch of the HPI Research School began its work there in November 2011. Five Chinese PhD students, under the joint supervision of their professors, are contributing to research on the topic of "Mass Data Analytics and Knowledge Discovery" at the fifty-member HPI Research School. The HPI regularly conducts German-Chinese workshops with Shanghai University on the topic of cloud computing. The Potsdam institute, which operates Europe's first innovation school for university students, is also working with the Communication University of China (CUC) in creating a Design Thinking program.

The history of German-Chinese scientific collaborative eLearning - begun in 2002 with the "Internet Bridge" - achieved another milestone at the beginning of September 2012 when the Hasso Plattner Institute began a new era in knowledge-transfer programs, offering open and free-of-charge online courses in information technology. Since then, more than 15,000 interested participants have been using the contents presented on the interactive Internet educational platform.

The first online course, offered by the Institute's founder and namesake, Prof. Hasso Plattner, who is also co-founder and chairman of the board of the software company SAP, lasts two months and provides an introduction to the subject of a revolutionary new main memory database technology. The language of instruction is English. Furthermore, since the beginning of November, HPI director Meinel has been conducting an online course in German focusing on the technical foundation of the Internet.