On a day in early winter, villagers gathered attentively in the Cultural Square of Wushi Township, Huangshan District, Huangshan City, Anhui Province.
Rural college students learning the guiding principles of the 20th National Congress of the CPC in Huangnidun Village, Lishui City, Zhejiang Province.
Long Shouju, a delegate to the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and member of the general Party branch and Wushi Village Commitee, Wushi Township, Huangshan District, was teaching them the guiding principles of the 20th National Congress of the CPC.
A member of a rural family, she has risen through hard work to become a leader of poverty alleviation in the village. She has also benefited from attending Huangshan Open University, where she mastered agricultural technology, entrepreneurship, and marketing. She has led the women of the local ethnic minority in setting up the first professional ethnic-minority planting and breeding cooperative in Huangshan District, with annual sales reaching millions of yuan.
In recent years, the Open University of China (OUC) has served and complied with national strategies in supporting rural revitalisation, and trained a large number of rural college students. Nowadays, more and more such students, like Long Shouju, are active in China’s vast rural areas, passionately contributing local strength to rural revitalisation.
Cultivating “bellwethers” in rural areas
"Every family in Xiaozhong Village has a bamboo mountain. Why? Because the natural environment and climate here are optimal for the growth of bamboo, and the shoots grown here are especially delicious." Cheng Weixing is going all out to promote winter bamboo shoots to a studio audience.
He is an official in Xiaozhong Ethnic Village, Sanren She Minority Township, Suichang County, Zhejiang Province. With the help of the "class of bellwethers" at Lishui Open University, the income generated by his studio has reached nearly 2 million yuan. In 2019, Lishui Open University launched this class to offer villagers such as secretaries of local Party organizations, Party-branch-committee and villager-committee members, and others, degree education and practical training.
Cheng Weixing said that he studied live-streaming at the university, and opened a studio soon after returning to the village. Nowadays, live-streaming with agricultural and other products has become a source of income there .
In recent years, the OUC has provided rural college students with a combination of fee reductions, awards, and government funding through the "One-College-Student-Per-Village Programme", giving them access to training. Sichuan Open University has selected 18 cities and prefectures for its pilot "Education for Degree Improvement of Rural Leaders”, to establish "bellwethers" of rural revitalisation; Shanxi Open University offers an "Education Improvement Project for Rural Officials" with the goal of having at least one college student as an village official in each administrative village; and the Long March Belt Education Project Targeted at Alleviating Poverty granted 9.8 million yuan in scholarships to 25 “revolutionary base areas”, including Ruijin City in Jiangxi Province and Cangxi County in Sichuan, benefiting over 8,600 people.
"Through practical courses on management, Party building, law, ideological and political affairs, and other fields, Party members and officials in rural communities have significantly enhanced their capacity for rural governance and industrial development," said Li Guangde, dean of the OUC College of Rural Revitalisation.
Building "a new engine" to acquire wealth
In the finals of the 7th China International College Student "Internet +" Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, an ambitious and promising young man, born in the 1990s in Hunan Province, gained a national silver medal. He is Yi Qiangqiang of the 2018 Rural Economic Management class at the OUC.
One of the first to develop specialised agricultural products in China, Yi Qiangqiang and his team developed a Mochella suitable for planting in Hunan Province. Later, it invented a double-layer coating for temperature control and a dynamic system to control temperature, light and humidity, increasing per-mu yield from 50 jin (2 jin equal 1 kilogramme) to 400.
"My studies at the open university have given me a systematic grasp of both cultivation and sales," said Yi Qiangqiang. His gains have been that of his hometown as well, since he has helped lead 123 low-income households in more than 10 villages in Loudi City to plant Morchella, making good use of more than 1,300 mu (about 86.7 hectares) of land, and increasing the incomes of the farmers participating by approximately 20,000 yuan annually.
By the end of 2021, the OUC had offered 29 junior-college and undergraduate programmes (directions) in agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, food, business administration and public administration, training about 600,000 graduates. On average, about 90% of rural college students choose to stay in their hometowns. In Hunan Province, about 60 percent of graduates have become business leaders.
More and more young people are learning to advance the revitalisation of rural industries through the OUC.
Combined online and offline efforts
"This experience has been really fantastic. I’ve gained a full understanding of goat anatomy, the position of the various organs, and I can dissect one myself, which is very helpful when it comes to raising Nanjiang Yellow Goat”. In the class Basics of Domestic Animal Anatomy at Sichuan Open University, student Wang Qide was able to both view the internal structure of a goat and dissect it using AI and VR. With digital classrooms becoming more and more common, information technologies such as artificial intelligence, 5G, and big data are being integrated into teaching at the OUC.
In Henan Province, the “Lecture Hall of Rural Revitalisation" organised by the Open University allows expert agronomists to examine crops and teach farmers directly in the fields. Operating both online and offline, the lecture hall is broadcast live to the entire province through the “smart education” platform of the Henan Rural Revitalisation Network College.
In recent years, the OUC has developed exclusive AI-based learning plans, targeted high-quality resources to strengthen learning support, and made learning evaluation automatic. It has formed an interactive knowledge map to connect teachers and students by way of “dominant automatic services with manual support" to provide all-round intelligent support services, and explored a modular course system of "public foundation courses + specialised foundation courses + specialised courses + comprehensive-practice courses + general courses + featured courses covering agriculture, rural areas and farmers". A "learning package" of economical and practical courses has been designed and produced, and measures such as sending teachers to villages and making use of local materials have been put in place.
So far, the OUC has built 538 intelligent cloud classrooms and 236 demonstration sites for digital learning resources in 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities.
"In the future, the OUC will upgrade its use of information technology, promote innovative development of “internet +” education, provide more opportunities, better learning resources, and enhanced teaching to a wider range of farmers, assisting the implementation of rural revitalisation, and making more equitable and better-quality education available," said Jing Degang, secretary of the Party Committee and president of the OUC.
Reprinted by the OUC News Network from Farmers' Daily in December 2022