Officials from MSU and China's National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language signed an agreement Monday to create the MSU Confucius Institute, which will provide online Chinese language instruction to students across the state.

MSU President Lou Anna K. Simon and Xu Lin, director general of the national office, signed documents written half in Chinese and half in English at a ceremony held at Cowles House on campus.

MSU will work with the China Central Radio and Television University in Beijing to create the curriculum, to be distributed by the Michigan Virtual University. MSU's institute will be the best funded of similar institutes, with an initial $250,000 investment from the Chinese government, and it will be the longest partnership at 10 years.