Associate Professor Han Yanhui from the School of Foreign Languages of the Open University of China(OUC) has been named a “Vanguard Party Member” by the Ministry of Education(MOE). In 2014, Han Yanhui undertook the “Six Network Integration”teaching model promoted by the OUC with the online core curriculum and began the trial construction of a teaching team. As an ordinary English teacher from the School of Foreign Languages, under the guidance of the outline and the overall arrangements for the important work of the university, Han Yanhui tried hard to explore the OUC’s “cross-regional and one-stop online teaching and learning model reform”.
This effectively drove the university’s cross-regional teaching reform based on the OUC system and provided helpful experience in exploring an online teaching model for other universities. At the same time, he studied diligently, participated in research on the “The Study and Practice of a Teaching Quality Guarantee System in Open Universities”, which was the subject of the “12th Five-year Plan” for national educational science, and wrote relative academic theses.
He has created a new teaching model, exploring the creation of an entirely new “one-stop” model integrating online teaching, learning, and evaluation for the teaching system of the OUC. This is not only a leading concept in China but also a breakthrough for teaching and innovation in the teaching system of the University. The teaching team selects excellent homework examples to use as teaching case studies, and integrates them into curriculum resources, so as to stimulate the initiative and enthusiasm of the students and help them participate in the curriculum development process. This helps to continuously produce generative curriculum resources, persistently renews the curriculum and enhances its practicability, and reinforces positive interaction between the teachers and students. In terms of evaluation, he referred to the interactive evaluation task model used by MOOCs. Mutual evaluation encourages learning motivation, enhances students’ evaluation ability and their ability to learn from each other, and promotes all-round personality development.
Organizing a “cross-regional” teaching team. By relying on the advantages of the OUC’s teaching system, as well as breaking down the original geographic restrictions of the radio and TV universities based on administrative divisions, Han Yanhui built an excellent teaching team without geographic restrictions and led the team to carry out trial work on the online core curriculum. The cross-regional teaching team not only broke the psychological barrier created by physical distance, it also reinforced cohesion in the OUC system. In order to support the development of the teaching team, he subsidized the teachers of the cross-regional teaching team.
Providing timely learner support. Han Yanhui led the teaching team to provide uninterrupted learner support for students from 8am to midnight, including weekends and holidays.
Conducting problem-oriented scientific research. While exploring an entirely new distance teaching model, Han Yanhui focused on indentifying, confronting, and analyzing problems through scientific methods, and led the teaching team to carry out scientific research to solve these problems. These problems included curriculum renewal, interaction between teachers and students, and learning motivation for distance learners. During the teaching process, he has identified problems and proposed new methods, which have generated a number of preliminary scientific research results, and also explored a teaching and study model for online learning. His research results have been accepted by evaluation experts inside and outside the university.
Han Yanhui not only did his best to explore and keep pace with different aspects of online teaching and academic research, but also went deep into the grass-roots level to carry out investigation and study, so as to understand the actual situation of the teachers and students on the front-line, and provide first-hand data and constructive opinions for the OUC’s teaching reform. After the first trial of the “Media-aided English Teaching” online core course in the spring semester of 2014 was completed successfully, he used his weekend to go to the trial divisions to carry out field investigation and face-to-face interviews to obtain first-hand research data. He traveled 2000km to Shenzhen and from Beijing to Shanwei RTVU, Guangdong, for a face-to-face audio interview with students which lasted for more than one hour. As a result, he was able to comprehensively understand students’ opinions and advice about the online core course and the teaching progress, and to listen to their feedback. Through this kind of face-to-face communication, the relationship between the teachers and the students was deepened. Furthermore, he also had an audio interview with leaders and tutors from Shanwei RTVU. The teachers were impressed by the cross-regional and one-stop online teaching model and believed it would be beneficial to them in the future.
Han Yanhui is especially interested in the growth and development of teachers from the grassroots RTVUs and he has done his best to create positive learning conditions for them. With the support of the OUC, he created an opportunity for the core members of the teaching team to come to Beijing to take part in backbone teacher training, which not only broadened their vision, and enhanced their working skills and professional level, but also further reinforced the team’s cohesion and inspired their enthusiasm. His efforts have accumulated valuable experience for the exploration of a growth path and incentive mechanism for cross-regional teaching teams.
Han Yanhui carried out his work with great passion. He used different communication methods to carry out continuous online teaching discussion with teaching teams from across different regions. He never stopped working, whether in his spare time or during work hours. By identifying and solving problems in a timely manner, the project was completed smoothly, and won unanimous praises from teachers and students in grassroots RTVUs.
Han Yanhui worked hard, voluntarily, and with no complaints. He undertook teaching tasks for five courses. He led the OUC’s teaching team to boldly explore a new model of online teaching and learning, and showed strong leadership skills. Besides completing his own teaching work well, he positively participated in scientific research for all the university’s subjects, and gave full play to the advantages accumulated in the online education field over ten years. He took part in the research of four important topics and played an important role as a backbone teacher. He has achieved good research results, which were highly praised by the research groups and evaluation experts.
By School of Foreign Languages , OUC