On the afternoon of 19 May 2020, the Open University of China (OUC) and UNESCO signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU). Jing Degang, OUC president and secretary of its Party Committee, and Marielza Oliveira, director and representative of the UNESCO Beijing Cluster Office, signed on behalf of the respective parties at a signing ceremony. The ceremony was also attended by deputy secretary general Mr Zhou Jiagui and director of the Department of Education Ms Jia Nan from the Secretariat of Chinese National Commission for UNESCO.

To further respond to UNESCO IITE Initiative “Combat COVID-19: Keep learning. Together we are on the move!” , the Open University of China(OUC) has continued to provide UNESCO with learning resources in Chinese and English to help with the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.

While the prevention and control of the COVID-19 outbreak in China has been positively extended as of March 2020, the pandemic has been spreading rapidly overseas.

The Open University of China (OUC) has offered high-quality learning resources to the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (hereinafter referred to as IITE) website in order to help learners around the world with “home-based online learning.”

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic, the international partners of the Open University of China (OUC) have paid close attention to its development, expressed their condolences and support to the OUC in various ways, strongly praised China's tremendous efforts in fighting the epidemic, and even helped by collecting protective materials to provide practical assistance.

From 24-28 December 2019, at the invitation of Toraighyrov Pavlodar State University (PSU) in Kazakhstan, a delegation of four members from the Open University of China(OUC) visited Almaty and Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, and discussed cooperation with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (Almaty) JSC, PSU, and NFC Kazakhstan LTD, a part of China Nonferrous Metal Construction Corporation Ltd. subordinate to China Nonferrous Metal Mining Group(CNMC) based in Kazakhstan.

A five-member delegation from the Open University of China (OUC) visited the headquarters of Universidad a Distancia de Madrid (UDIMA) and its Barcelona campus from 10-11 December 2019, to discuss cooperation on the construction of football education courses and preliminary preparations for the joint construction of an online Confucius Institute on the Internet, and to learn about the experiences of UDIMA’s regional teaching centre in teaching management and curriculum resource construction.

From 12-13 December 2019, 15 teachers and students from Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University (STOU) paid a two-day cultural exchange visit to the OUC. The delegation was led by executive vice president of STOU, associate professor Thapanat Prom-In, along with four teachers and 10 students from the Faculty of Arts, the School of Management, the School of Law, the School of Human Ecology, and the School of Politics.