Objective To investigate college students' awareness and cognition of 84 shared courses on the Internet and analyze the discrepancies between different ethnicity and majors in Xinjiang Medical University. Methods Purposive sampling was adopted with questionnaire of 1 448 students of 26 classes in Xinjiang Medical University. The survey aimed to investigate students' awareness and cognition of these In- ternet courses. Obtained data were statistically analyzed using SPSS 13.0, and the test level α=0.05. Result The hits of preventative medicine, Chinese medicine, clinical medicine and pharmacy were 19.0%, 33.3%, 35.7% and 11.9% respectively. Among the courses whose hits exceeded 50,000, clinical medicine accounted for 50%, preventive medicine for 21.4%, Chinese medicine and pharmacy for 14.3% respectively, there being no significant difference in overall hits (P>0.05). 90.1% of the surveyed students knew shared courses on the Internet, there being no difference between gender, ethnicity and profession (P>0.05). 89.8% had an accurate understanding of the concept of shared courses on the Internet, there being differences between gender and major ( χ2gender=11.013, P=0.026; χ2major=136.08, P=0.000) without significant differences in ethnicity ( χ2=11.378, P=0.497). 71.9% of the students used shared courses on the Internet as reference resources for the course study, 46.6% for the learning content, 35.5%for the understanding of other resources related to the course, 30.1% for lab-class and exercises, 10% for discussion on online course forum. The Han and Kazak students used the courses as a study, experiment and exercise tool, while the Uyghur and Kazak mainly used these for learning and discussion on the forum, there being differences in ethnicity ( χ2=26.889, P=0.001); the usage rate of the courses of preventive medicine students is higher, whereas pharmacy students relatively low, there being significant differences in major ( χ2=38.01, P=0.004). The Kazakh and Uygur students mainly used the courses to formulate learning plans, and the Han students to learn the current curriculum. 44.7% of preventive medicine students used the courses to improve their abilities, which was significantly higher than those of other majors. Only 18.4% and 1% of pharmacy students used the courses to formulate learning plans and to improve their abilities, which were both lower than those of other majors, showing ethnic and professional differences ( χ2ethnic=37.654, P=0.001; χ2major=73.68, P=0.000). Conclusion Students' awareness of shared courses on the Internet is high and their cognition is accurate. However, there are differences in the ways and purposes of the employment of the courses between different ethnicity and majors. The main reason may be related to major, the quality of the courses, as well as the lack of effec-tive supervision and evaluation system, suggesting that the management department in our university should strengthen the supervision and evaluation of the courses and give full play to the important role of shared courses on the Internet.