Over 100 teachers of Portuguese as a foreign language in the Asia-Pacific region enrolled for a free course of instruction taught online by the Macao Polytechnic Institute (MPI) between June 30 and July 15, the institute says.

A written announcement issued by MPI says the course was taught to a bigger audience of teachers of Portuguese than any yet held online, attracting more participants than in previous offline editions.

Among those that enrolled for the course were teachers at Tsinghua University, Beijing Normal University and Shanghai International Studies University, all in mainland China.

The course was a manifestation of the effort to make Macao an international centre for the teaching of Portuguese and research into the language, and for turning out people bilingual in Chinese and Portuguese, MPI says.