The Report of the 19th National Congress of the CPC proposes a series of major strategies, including the implementation of the strategy of rejuvenating the country through science and education and the strategy of reinvigorating China through human resources development.
The report also proposes that education must be prioritised, educational modernisation should be accelerated, and a good job should be done in creating an education system that people are satisfied with. Du Zhanyuan, vice minister of the Ministry of Education (MOE) in charge of educational informatisation, has a profound understanding of the above strategies. According to him, accelerating the development of educational informatisation is a strong support to comprehensively promote the modernisation of education.
Delegate to the 19th National Congress of the CPC and vice minister of the Ministry of Education Du Zhanyuan
Du Zhanyuan explained the importance of educational informatisation in the new era in terms of “four wills”. He says that educational informatisation will bring about the innovation of educational concepts and a profound revolution of teaching models, will become an effective means of improving educational equality and enhancing the quality of education, will be a strong support for the creation of a ubiquitous learning environment and lifelong learning for all, and will greatly enhance scientific decision-making and comprehensive governance.
Du Zhanyuan reviewed the achievements of education information construction in China since the 18th CPC national congress. First, the construction and application of the “Three Accesses and Two Platforms” has accelerated, with all indicators having basically doubled and exceeded the expected target. Second, the “Access to Broadband Internet for All Schools” programme has developed rapidly, with the rate of internet access in primary and secondary schools in China increasing from 25% to 90% and the proportion of multimedia classrooms rising from less than 40% to 83%. Third, the “Quality Resources for All Classes” programme has been popularised and a new normal of using information-based teaching in classrooms has been preliminarily formed. Fourth, the development of the “Access to the Online Learning Space for Everyone” programme has leapt forward. Fifth, the “Educational Resources Public Service Platform” started to have its initial scale. Sixthly, the teachers’ ability to apply information technology has been improved, with nearly ten million teachers in primary and secondary schools, more than 100,000 principals of primary and secondary schools, and more than 200,000 teachers in vocational schools having been trained and their information literacy effectively improved.
Du Zhanyuyan said that we should keep promoting and providing services for educational reform and development. Although educational informatisation was initially presented as a technological means, technology itself was not the purpose. We should adhere to the principle of using education informatisation to serve educational reform and development. The in-depth application of education informatisation across the whole process of education, teaching, and management can make teaching more individualised, education more equal, management more streamlined, and decision-making more scientific, so as to realise professional talent training targets in the information era.
We should insist on treating the deep integration of information technology and educational teaching practice as a core idea. In order to solve the major problems currently faced by educational reform and development, we can try to provide effective and feasible solutions through information technology. By comprehensively applying information technology across the entire process of teaching and learning, we will finally be able to realise the goal of leading the innovation of education concepts and models through informatisation and to play both a supporting and a leading role in education reform and development.
We should adhere to the policy of making application the driving force for carrying forward information-based education. With application as a target, we should construct an application environment through infrastructure construction, expand application channels by means of teaching and scientific researches, promote the effect of applications that rely on training, and enhance the application level via evaluation. We should focus on promoting the “Three Applications” i.e. “application in classrooms, frequent application, and universal application” in order to realise application from just a few people to the vast majority of teachers and students, from application outside the classroom to application in the classroom, from application display to application in normal teaching.
We should continue to treat giving full play to the functions of the government and the market as an advantage of mechanism innovation. We should adhere to the principle of walking with “two-legs” i.e. the government and the market, make better use of the “invisible hand” and the “visible hand”, and explore and form a mechanism that includes policy support from the government, construction by enterprises, and continuing use by schools.
Transferring ideas and improving training should be continuously treated as an important starting point for our work. The MOE has organised 43 training classes focusing on educational informatisation for directors from the educational departments and the educational bureaus, which have trained more than 5,400 people. A series of special seminars about education informatisation for primary education in the central and western regions of China and information-based education in higher education were also held. Through the National Training Plan and various other enterprise training programmes, information-based leadership and the information technology application abilities of teachers have been effectively enhanced.
We should adhere to the fundamental working model of exerting the pioneering role of pilot programmes as examples to be promoted on a larger scale. The first group of the MOE’s 682 experimental units for educational informatisation have passed approval. Some regional pilot programmes implemented in Hubei, Anhui, Hainan, and Shandong have achieved good results. This year, a collection of excellent cases will be published, with more trial programmes deployed in another 18 provinces. Through methods such as convening on-the-spot meetings, the OUC summarised and generalised the experiences and practices, led various regions to find the right points and advance the work from “one area” to “all areas”. The work is progressing smoothly.
We should make opening up and cooperation an important direction for promoting educational informatisation and enhancing international influence. Through international exchange and cooperation, we can disseminate and popularise the work experience in educational informatisation in China. UNESCO held a ministerial forum on educational informatisation in the Asia-pacific region in Shenzhen in 2013 and also co-organised with China the first international education informatisation conference in Qingdao in 2015, which published the Qingdao’s Declaration. A number of experts in educational informatisation have emerged from China. Many countries have also developed a keen interest in the practice of educational informatisation in China, hoping that Chinese experts could offer them guidance.
The innovation of an application model suitable for and in line with local conditions in China should be deemed a basic direction for development. All regions and schools, in combination with the actual situation and by adapting to local conditions, have begun to explore an application model for educational informatisation and created a number of case studies and effective application models, including resource co-construction and sharing, teacher application, classroom application, digital campus, online learning space, cross-school application, regional overall promotion, and management information system application.
When talking about the future development direction of educational informatisation, Du Zhanyuan noted that it is important to fully implement the spirit of the 19th CPC national congress, and in accordance with the demands of education reform and development in the new era, to sturdily promote the integration, innovation, and development of educational informatisation. During the period of the 13th Five-Year Plan, we will adhere to the principle of “serving the overall interests of the country, promoting integration and innovation, deepening application, and perfecting a mechanism”, work hard to promote the “Four Abilities” of educational informatisation i.e. the ability to provide fundamental support, the ability to serve teaching and management, the ability to promote education fairness and educational quality, and the ability to develop and supply services for digital education resources, speed up the pace of using information technology to carry forward education innovation, and strive to realise the “Four Developments” of educational informatisation i.e. from serving teaching and education itself to serving national economic and social development, from serving classroom learning to supporting internet-based universal learning, from serving teaching and education to serving the whole process of cultivating people, and from serving general education management to thoroughly enhancing educational governance ability.
First, we should construct a learner development model based on the conditions of informatisation. We should explore a new type of teaching model based on information technology, reinforce research on the rules of learners’ cognitive and learning behaviours, cultivate teachers and students’ digital teaching and learning habits, and implement a new teaching organisation model with the aim of teaching students in accordance with their individual aptitude. We should reshape the teaching evaluation and management pattern, use a new generation of information technology to track and monitor the overall process of teaching, carry out learning situation analysis and learning diagnosis, accurately evaluate the teaching and learning effect, transform singular, results-oriented assessments into comprehensive and process-based multidimensional assessments, and move from focusing on teaching knowledge to focusing on cultivating ability and quality. We should establish the fundamental conditions and training environment required for information-based teaching, formulate school construction standards in accordance with informatisation requirements, build an environment for universal, open learning, provide abundant digital education resources, and construct an intelligent learning environment for everyone to learn anywhere and anytime.
Second, we should develop an education service model based on the Internet. We should set up a co-construction and sharing mechanism for excellent digital educational resources, perfect a mechanism for distribution and intellectual property protection, build a public service platform for excellent teaching resources, and offer the best resources to each learner so as to narrow the education gap. Diverse education services should be encouraged. The policy environment of using information technology to carry out educational innovation should be optimised. A system for the regulation of the quality of digital educational resources should be established and used as a prerequisite for teaching. We should leverage the market mechanism to optimise the allocation of education resources, integrate online and offline resources, and innovate the service supply model, so as to provide educational resources for lifelong learning.
Third, we should explore an educational governance model for the information era. We should lay a scientific foundation for the construction of an education management information system and accelerate the formation of an education management and monitoring system that covers schools and learners at all levels. We should carry forward the reform of the education governance model based on big data, establish and perfect an open directory of public information resources, and form a unified, safe, interconnected, and controllable national education data system. We should construct a safe and orderly environment for informatisation, strengthen the construction of standards, establish and improve the supervision mechanism, and resist the invasion of harmful information so as to ensure network and data safety.
Finally, Du Zhanyuan said that educational informatisation is a basic part and distinguishing feature of education modernisation and the only road to education reform and development in the information age. It plays an irreplaceable role and has become a powerful and effective means of promoting educational equality, enhancing the quality of education, and drive education reform. We must succeed in educational informatisation and achieve effects and results.
Written by Cai Jile; Edited by Yan Jingzhen, China Education Daily