Xie Jun graduated with a Master's degree in Constitution and Administrative Law from Renmin University of China, and with a PhD in Constitution and Administrative Law from the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Since July 2004, he has been working as a teacher and teacher manager at the Experimental School of the Open University of China (OUC).

He has taught Administrative Law, Administrative Procedure Law, State Compensation Law and other courses to Law Science majors. In recent years, he has offered general courses such as Law to non-Law majors in both the junior-college and undergraduate programmes.

Xie Jun is passionate about online distance education, and has made himself deeply familiar with the relevant technology. This has involved taking MOOCs; he has obtained certificates of completion for seven courses on the websites Coursera, Edx, and iCourse163.org, and gained an understanding of online-course design this way. At the same time, he has become familiar with the pitfalls of online instruction, and come to understand the uses of the OUC learning network (www.ouchn.cn) through reading, consultation, and other forms of instruction. His particular focus has been on how to undertake teaching within it.

Xie Jun is a student of the strategies and methodologies of online teaching. In 2012, he helped reform blended teaching, integrating face-to-face tutorials with online instruction to enhance the effectiveness of both, developing new methods of online teaching, enhancing teacher-student communication with obvious effects on student engagement, and coordinating the work of the teaching teams in Beijing, Taiyuan and Nanhai through efficient division of responsibilities. In 2012, his efforts won first prize in the Teaching Achievement awards of the Open University of China.

Xie Jun is an example for other online teachers in terms of his innovations, which he divulges through lectures and workshops. He has visited Chongqing, Changchun, Shijiazhuang and other cities to take part in exchanges on the uses of learning networks, and has organised cooperative teaching and shared high-quality courses with the help of online teaching tools. Since the autumn of 2017, he has also organised collaborative teaching within the school. High-level teachers lecture at the Weigongcun Study Centre, and students in other centres are able to access these lectures via the cloud classroom. Interaction is prioritised in all course designs, with student involvement promoted through votes, tests and so on using the cloud-classroom teaching tools. Cooperative teaching helps deal with dispersed students, lack of teachers, and other  difficulties associated with open education, and has become popular in various study centers, including with the students, who have a 90% satisfaction rate.

Xie Jun has participated in a project sponsored by the China National Arts Fund to extend online-education strategies to non-degree education. In December 2016, he became a member of the project team of the Chinese Traditional Landscape Painting Appreciation and Creation & Moodle Platform Construction , responsible for course design and operations. From May to July 2018, the Moodle-based online traditional-landscape-painting project was implemented, with 1,286 students taking part. The learning platform was accessed more than 444,800 times, and nearly 52,000 contributions were made to forums and WeChat discussions. Learning tasks were completed at a rate of 59.6%, and more than 85% of the students were satisfied.

 

By OUC News Network