Abstract: Leveraging the development of a first-class microbiology course as an opportunity, the teaching team formulated an overarching concept for innovative offline classroom teaching design, guided by the goal of enhancing student competencies. This concept focuses on the overall goal of the course, aims at the teaching pain points, promotes the innovation of teaching ideas, combines knowledge teaching with comprehensive quality training. The teaching innovation resulted in diverse exploratory and participatory teaching formats and models through measures such as the optimization of the teaching content system, the introduction of teaching cases and online platform resources, the application of multi-scene classroom teaching mode, participatory inverted classroom, interactive sharing activities and other classroom teaching measures. The teaching reform innovated the assessment and evaluation approach for the microbiology course throughout the entire learning process. After several years of teaching reform practice, the microbiology course innovations have proven to be highly effective in enhancing student competencies. Specifically, they have played a positive role in improving students’ abilities in language expression, PPT production, teamwork, innovative thinking, professional cognition, aesthetic creativity, practical operation, and professional learning. The teaching innovations have also yielded significant results in students’ performance in discipline competitions, postgraduate research selection, and vocational skills development.

Key words: microbiology, teaching innovation, improvement of competencies, first-class course, practice