From 9-10 July 2019, the Open University of China (OUC) organised for a team of experts to evaluate the bachelor's degree conferral rights for four majors that were opened in the spring semester of 2018: Pharmacy, Rural Regional Development, Mining Engineering, and Engineering Costing. This is the first time that the OUC has launched evaluation work for the right to grant bachelor's degrees to new majors that haven’t yielded any graduate students yet.

2019 marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Open University of China (OUC). As an important part of the celebrations, a series of academic seminars celebrating the 40th anniversary of the founding of the OUC jointly organised by the General Office of Party and Administration and the Education Research Institute have been successfully carried out.

Nowadays, information technology, including the internet, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, is sweeping the world, affecting production, lifestyles, and more. In education, novelties such as micro-classes, MOOCs, flipped classrooms, ubiquitous learning, online education, and so on, have posed a severe challenge to traditional models, and ways of incorporating IT into education are being explored throughout China.

To regulate the development of after-school training, the general office of the State Council issued Opinions on Regulating the Development of After-School Training in August 2018, pointing out that we should focus on the supervision and control of teacher training. Access to online education, an important part of after-school training, is open, but it has much higher requirements in terms of teaching resources, as well as research and teaching levels. Developing effective online teachers requires careful consideration.

An advanced workshop on the comprehensive reform and development of continuing education in regular universities was held recently in Hulunbuir, Inner Mongolia.

There are three difficulties facing online art education: the clarity of demonstrations, timeliness of interactions, and feasibility of organising group classes. For nearly 30 years, Tang Yingshan, director of Faculty of Art Education at the Open University of China (OUC), has been developing distance art education and seeking solutions to these three problems. He says that the development of the internet and online education have brought these solutions within reach.

Continuing education is repeatedly emphasised in reports from the 16th, 17th, and 18th CPC National Congresses. A major decision has been made “to conduct effective continuing education” programmes, appearing once more in Comrade Xi Jinping’s report Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Prosperous Society in all Aspects - Strive for the Great Success of Chinese Socialism in a New Era, (called “the Report” hereafter) delivered at the 19th CPC National Congress.

Building a learning society is critical to meeting current development demands. It is also an important component of realising the Two Centenary Goals and the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. Based on the requirements of “improving open universities” and a pilot “exploring the building mode of open universities,” both part of the National Outline for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020), the Open University of China (OUC) has made positive explorations into the Chinese mode of open universities, and fruitful achievements, rendering powerful assistance to the building of a learning society in China.