OUC Faculty of Forestry and Medicine Holds Meeting on Training of Rural Professionals

The foundation of rural revitalisation is skills training. Professor Zhu Zhen, director of the Institute of Problems Facing Agricultural Workers and the Agricultural Culture Research Centre of China Agricultural University, delivered a report titled "China's Rural Skills-training from the Perspective of the Strategy of National Rural Revitalisation" to OUC faculty and students 21 April 2021, with the aim of enhancing the quality of such training at the Open University of China (OUC).

Launched by the OUC and implemented by the OUC Faculty of Forestry and Medicine, this event was one of series of similar lectures by 100 famous teachers. Carried out both online and offline, it included nearly 20 leaders and teachers from the OUC headquarters on-site, another 1,372 teachers and students watching a live broadcast, and 1,029 who would later watch a recording of it.

Zhu Qizhen pointed out that the most urgent needs for rural revitalisation lie in training farmers, enhancing technology, and ensuring national agricultural security. To implement the rural-revitalisation strategy, the focus should be on family farms and farmer cooperatives, with two-tier management that constantly strives for greater efficiency. Professor Zhu spoke of where trainees should be found and how the OUC could contribute to training them, stressing the importance of finding large numbers to serve rural reconstruction.

The event, at which the OUC was also awarded the 2020 UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Education (also known as the UNESCO Prize for the Use of Information and Communication Technologies in Education), and where it launched the "Internet plus" Rural Revitalisation Skills-training Forum and established the Rural Revitalisation College, aimed to help consolidate the internal and external strengths of the OUC system, promote connections between its poverty-alleviation and rural-revitalisation efforts, and promote the training of farmers willing to serve rural areas.

By Fu Jinfeng, OUC