Abstract Starting from the spring of 2020, the outbreak of the COVID‐19 caused Chinese universities to close the campuses and forced them to initiate online teaching. This paper focuses on a case of Peking University's online education. Six specific instructional strategies are presented to summarize current online teaching experiences for university instructors who might conduct online education in similar circumstances. The study concludes with five high‐impact principles for online education: (a) high relevance between online instructional design and student learning, (b) effective delivery on online instructional information, (c) adequate support provided by faculty and teaching assistants to students; (d) high‐quality participation to improve the breadth and depth of student's learning, and (e) contingency plan to deal with unexpected incidents of online education platforms.