At the 2024 National Conference on Education, President XI Jinping stressed the thorough implementation of the national strategy for the digitalisation of education, to expand the coverage of quality educational resources and to improve public services for lifelong learning, which was a systematic deployment for the construction of a learning society, highlighting the crucial role of digital empowerment in lifelong education within the overall framework of building a leading country in education.
"The Master Plan on Building China into a Leading Country in Education (2024-2035)" (hereinafter referred to as the "Master Plan") put forward for the first time the construction of a ubiquitous and accessible lifelong education system, making it one of the eight major systems for building a leading country in education. The Master Plan also set the goal of "completely establishing a learning society by 2035," which fully reflects Chinese Government's profound understanding of the laws governing educational development, the lifelong growth of individuals, and the comprehensive advancement of society.
Recognising the Significance of Building a Learning Society
The construction of a learning society serves as a robust pillar for China's modernisation drive. Chinese modernisation is characterised by its large-scale population. To support Chinese modernisation through high-quality population growth, it is essential to regard building a leading country in education as a strategic project for high-quality population growth. By offering lifelong learning opportunities, workers' knowledge systems will be updated and their skills and capabilities will be upgraded, which will effectively enhance the national quality and the quality of human capital, providing talent and intellectual support for cultivating new drivers of growth and developing new quality productive forces, thereby laying a solid human resource foundation for Chinese modernisation.
Building a ubiquitous and accessible lifelong education system is an inevitable requirement for constructing a leading country in education. The Master Plan sets the goal of "completely establishing a high-quality education system" by 2035. This requires that the lifelong education system should be an integral part of the overall education system, which will drive the transformation of the education system from traditional school-based education to a broader lifelong education model. The scope of education services will be expanded from school-age populations to all the people, and the education cycle will be shifted from the school-age stage to the entire life cycle, which will achieve seamless vertical integration and horizontal connections across all levels and types of education, injecting new connotations into the construction of a leading country in education and providing new impetus for lifelong human development.
Improving the public service for lifelong learning is an important manifestation of the people-oriented nature of education. Currently, lifelong learning is increasingly becoming a lifestyle, and lifelong education is evolving into a basic public service. By leveraging digital technology to empower various learning scenarios and meet the diverse needs of high-quality learning of the public, which will effectively narrow the gaps between urban and rural areas, promote social equity, enhance people's well-being, and furthermore powerfully drive social progress, fulfilling the people's aspirations for a better life.
Grasping the Inherent Requirements of Building a Learning Society in the Overall Context of Building a Leading Country in Education
Since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the Chinese Government has attached great importance to the construction of a learning society. Lifelong education has entered a new stage of development. It must be recognised that building a learning society is a systematic project. It necessitates not only strengthening government coordination, ensuring top-level design, and promoting inter-departmental collaboration, but also leveraging educational digitalisation as an engine to build a more comprehensive lifelong education system. The enthusiasm of diverse societal entities, including learners, government agencies, industry enterprises, and urban and rural communities will be mobilised to form a new ecosystem of lifelong learning characterised by active participation and shared benefits among all citizens.
Digital empowerment is the key path to building a learning society. Currently, a new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is bringing about significant changes in production and lifestyle, as well as in education. Major countries around the world are attaching great importance to educational digitalisation, formulating strategies for the development of digital education, and exploring new forms of educational services that use digital technology to drive educational transformation and meet the future high-level lifelong learning needs. The Master Plan proposes "strengthening the digital infrastructure for a learning society" and defines the important task of "building a national digital university," which is of far-reaching significance for building a learning society in the era of digital intelligence. We should give full play to the advantages of the new system of pooling national resources and strengths to harness the efforts of the education system, gather high-quality national and international resources, and ride on the wave of digitalisation and intelligence. By adhering to the principles of international leadership, national strategy, digital and intelligent features, differentiated development, and brand guidance, we aim to meet the learning needs of learners who seek for continuous enhancement and capability development. We will create a new model of university in the digital age that combines both large-scale and individualized learning, featuring lifelong learning services, individualized cultivation, and modern internal governance.
A ubiquitous and accessible lifelong education system is the foundation for building a learning society. In terms of system construction, we should give full play to the leading role of the education system of the Open University of China (OUC), which covers both urban and rural areas across the country, in the construction of a learning society. We need to improve and strengthen the institutional guarantees for continuing education, self-taught higher education examinations, non-degree education, etc., and coordinate efforts to improve the educational quality. In terms of accessibility, we should underline universality, inclusiveness, and equity. We should make full use of advanced digital technologies to share educational resources, build a public platform for lifelong education service, enrich the ubiquitous learning space, and innovate models of networked and intelligent service to satisfy the needs of various social groups, which features the increasingly customized and diverse learning and development
A sound institutional framework is the fundamental guarantee for building a learning society. The Master Plan attaches great importance to institutional construction and clearly proposes to "build a lifelong learning system based on a qualifications framework, with a credit bank as the platform, and centred on the recognition of learning outcomes." This is an important foundation for establishing a mechanism to promote national lifelong learning. From the perspective of the development and practices of global lifelong education, more than 160 countries and regions have established or adopted qualifications frameworks, providing strong institutional support for the development of lifelong education and promoting the optimal allocation of key resources for education and human resource development. We should base our efforts on China's national conditions and actively draw on international experience to accelerate the construction of qualifications framework, providing unified and clear classification standards for academic qualifications and professional qualifications. This will promote the vertical and horizontal connections among different levels of academic education. We should speed up the construction of a national credit bank to store, accumulate, and transfer various learning achievements, building a "bridge" for talent cultivation. We should actively explore innovative learning forms such as course-based master's programmes, micro-majors, and micro-credentials, and establish an educational system and degree framework that are compatible with lifelong learning, promoting the integrated development of vocational education, higher education, and continuing education.
Digital Empowerment of Lifelong Education Should Focus on Enhancing Capacity of Service and Contribution
The Master Plan makes specific arrangements for digital empowerment of lifelong education. We should align with national strategic needs, focus on key tasks, and strive to enhance our service contribution capacity.
Firstly, we should support the national strategy for building a learning society and improve the public service for lifelong learning. We need to improve the OUC system and promote the digital empowerment of comprehensive reform of education and teaching across the board. Guided by the principle of emphasising learners' capability development, we should reform the evaluation methods to enhance the quality of open education. We should build and make full use of the lifelong education platform of Smart Education of China, integrate and share various lifelong learning resources, encourage schools at all levels, communities, enterprises and institutions to jointly contribute to the construction of a learning society, and actively explore models and typical paths for building learning cities and communities.
Secondly, we should support the strategy for national educational digitalisation and build a national digital university. Focusing on national strategic needs and the requirements of new quality productive forces, we should gather world-class resources, plan for emerging interdisciplinary majors, innovate new paradigms for digital education, build a new generation of individualized intelligent learning platforms, and cultivate more interdisciplinary and innovative talents for new industries and business models. The University will meet the diverse needs of individualized learning and sustainable development and will become a testing ground and pioneer zone for the integrated, intelligent, and international development of the national strategy for educational digitalisation.
Thirdly, we should support the national strategy for actively responding to population aging and enhance the development of the Seniors University of China (SUC). By adhering to the school-running principle of "Virtue, Learning, Health, Happiness and Accomplishment," we should establish a new education mechanism for collaborative school operation. We should iteratively upgrade the National Education Platform for the Elderly and build a new teaching model that combines experiential, participatory, online, and offline learning. We should encourage diverse entities to actively participate in community-based elderly education or senior universities, and further improve the school-running network of SUC, and give full play to its role as the "main channel" for elderly education, the "strong guide" for proactive health, and the "catalyst" for the silver economy. We should extend educational services to urban and rural communities, helping to ensure that the elderly can enjoy a fulfilling life and make their contributions.
Fourthly, we should serve the strategy for opening up education and enhance China's international influence and voice in lifelong education. We should take the initiative and accelerate the "going global" process by building open learning centres. We should expand international cooperation in the fields of lifelong education research, resource sharing, standard-setting, infrastructure construction, and capacity building. We should explore new paths for the "Digital Study in China" initiative, enabling more high-quality educational resources to go global. This will allow China to take a lead in the global digital education development and lead the global advancement of lifelong education.
Authored by Dr. WANG Qiming, President of OUC
Reprinted from Guangming Daily, Page 15, 25 February 2025