Zhang Xia, who joined the Open University of China (OUC) in 2003, is secretary of the CPC Party branch, vice dean, and a full-time teacher in the Faculty of Education.
She leads Public-service Management (School Management) and two other specialised courses, and is a member of the Teaching Steering Committee of the Steering Committee of Vocational Colleges (2021-2025) of the Ministry of Education, as well as of the Education Sub-committee of the Degree-evaluation Committee of the OUC.
Witnessing the Rapid Development of Education as a Discipline
She has been involved in teacher-education course-resource development, teaching reforms, learner-support services, team building, and so on, and has witnessed the rapid development of the OUC. In the past ten years, enrolment in Education has exceeded 1.14 million, and online teacher education has expanded from the management and education categories to sports discipline.
She is in charge of the formulation of training and teaching reforms for Education majors at the OUC, the work of the Teaching-research Centre, the application for the right to confer Education bachelor degrees at the OUC, and the formulation of standards and specifications for Education dissertations there.
In addition, she has organised a number of skills competitions for Education teachers at the OUC, as well as a competition for the integration of ideology and politics into courses, with the aim of promoting professional development.
In 2013, the textbook Introduction to Management, of which she was deputy editor, won the Beijing Higher Education Textbook Excellence Award, and in June 2016, Introduction to Modern Teacher Studies, of which she led the development , was named a "National Quality Resource-sharing Course". She was also given the 15th Beijing Higher-education Master-teacher Award in 2019.
Constant Reform and Innovation to Improve Online Teaching
In 2018, Zhang Xia began to set up a teaching team for Modern Home Economics, and to collaborate in the construction of related online courses. Since spring 2020, she has led the team in implementing five sessions of online-teaching reforms for the course, organising live teaching, teaching activities, and teaching-and-research activities, providing direct teaching and learner support to 724 students in the pilot project.
For her teaching-reform project "Exploring the Online-teaching Model of the Open University", which received the Beijing Teaching-master Award, she organised a team of teachers to research online teaching, exploring how to integrate information technology and the university's MOOC resources to optimise the teaching design of online courses, use multiple assessment mechanisms and student motivators, and use big data to research learning behaviour and teaching effectiveness.
The revised Modern Home Economics course was well received by teachers and students, with both online teaching and student performance significantly better than in the standard course. The teaching team was rated excellent in the annual 2020-2021 assessment, and one of its teachers came first in the OUC Education category of the Teaching-case Competition for Public-service (Education) Management. Another won the Award of Excellence in the OUC Teaching-case Competition for Primary Education.
Professional Development of Research-based Teachers
"Lifelong learning" is the basic philosophy of open education, and her constant pursuit.
Her focus has been on the professional development of open-education teachers. She has presided over the adult-education research of the China Adult-education Association's 13th and 14th five-year plans, with fruitful results. Her monograph "Introduction to Open-education Teachers" was shortlisted for the "14th Five-year Plan" national key publication of special-planning projects, and she has published a number of papers in core journals.
Looking ahead, she hopes to continuously improve digital literacy and the ability to integrate information technology into teaching, develop useful and easy-to-use learning resources, and prepare for online teaching. She aims to provide learners with personalised teaching and support, and leverage artificial intelligence and big data to achieve enhanced professional development.
By OUC News Network