On 23rd February 2023, the signing ceremony and workshop on promoting work for sharing and application of data among universities, jointly sponsored by the Education Management Information Centre of the Ministry of Education (MOE) and Peking University, was held in Beijing.
Leaders and representatives from 24 universities, including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Beihang University, and the Open University of China (OUC), attended the meeting. Vice president of the OUC, Fan Xianrui and relevant comrades from the OUC Information Technology Department attended the conference and participated in the signing ceremony.
The report to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposed to promote digitalisation of education, implement the confirmation of authentic right of public data, promote data sharing and openness, and achieve interconnected education data, which is the current focus. The Ministry of Education attaches great importance to data construction, and has built a database covering students, teachers, and schools in universities across the country, as well as an educational data governance platform. Based on the platform, the ministry and universities work together to create a new ecology of shared data construction.
Representatives from the Education Management Information Centre of the MOE provided a detailed introduction to the platform for sharing and application of data among universities. The platform brings together over 100 interface services from more than 20 departments, and is designed with 5 primary indicators and 21 secondary indicators. There are 218 monitoring indicators for universities and 1,080 monitoring indicators for disciplines. Pilot schools can apply for open API interface authorisation to achieve data sharing and exchange, and provide data application cloud services for teachers and students. During the workshop, 8 universities including Peking University, Tsinghua University, and Fudan University shared their practical cases in data sharing and application.
The OUC signed a strategic agreement for data sharing and application with the Education Management Information Centre of the MOE and joined the first batch of pilot units on the platform for sharing and application of data among universities, which is one of the important measures for promoting digital university construction. Through the data sharing and application platform, the university can access government data shared by relevant departments to improve the efficiency and accuracy of related businesses such as test-taker identity verification and new student information collection and comparison. At the same time, the OUC can share public data in the fields of lifelong learning and elderly education with the Ministry of Education and sister colleges through the data sharing and application platform, and synchronously promote the sharing and co-governance of business data in the OUC’s education system to activate data application scenarios and contribute to the construction of a lifelong learning system for all.
By Wei Fangfang, Ma Weina, OUC