3. Relevant Policies and Projects of the Chinese Government or Institutions
In 2003, the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) launched the construction of high-quality courses, and over 1,000 national high-quality courses were developed in 2006. The construction of high-quality courses was defined in 2007, and the objective was to achieve the sharing of quality national university teaching resources. The relevant contents of the high-quality courses are all made publicly available via websites. In 2009, C9, made up of nine Chinese universities, including Beijing University and Tsinghua University, conducted personnel exchange, credit transfer, and course sharing on a larger scale. In 2011, “20 open video courses of Chinese universities” were produced by universities in China and open to the public free of charge. The first 120 resource sharing courses from Chinese universities were officially freely opened to the public via icourses.edu.cn on June 26, 2013.
Chinese government policies advocate education digitalization, which benefits online education development. Since July 2010 when the Central Party Committee and the State Council issued the National Outline for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010-2020) and arranged for an “education information network”, the national senior management authorities have promulgated dozens of policies concerning education digitalization, all of which have promoted online education to some extent. Among them is the 10-Year Education Digitalization Development Plan (2011-2020) issued by the MOE in March 2012. It is proposed in the plan that the key to the next 10 years of education development is digitalization, and that the three major tasks for the 10-year development cycle are comprised of: constructing an education cloud network, training information technology talents, and building information management systems. In July 2012, the MOE issued the Twelfth Five-Year Plan of National Education Development and proposed the realization of education modernization and the building of a learning society by the year 2020, entering the ranks of powerful countries rich in human resources. In June 2014, the Decision of the State Council on Accelerating the Development of Modern Vocational Education (hereinafter referred to as “Decision”) was issued, and a full deployment was made to accelerate the development of modern vocational education. As stated in the Decision, “A world class modern vocational education system with Chinese characteristics shall be developed for the adaptation of development needs, the deep integration of industry with teaching, the connection between secondary and tertiary vocational education, and the intercommunication of vocational and regular education, which embodies the lifelong education concept”. In 2013, the State Council issued the “Broad-Band China” Strategy and Implementation Scheme to strengthen strategic guidance, systematic deployment, and the fast and sound development of broadband infrastructure in China. This type of policy support is sure to leave a clear space in which online education can continue to flourish.
The decision-makers share the same understanding. At the 2014 National Education Work Conference, MOE explicitly indicated the major challenges faced by the future of Chinese education. They include: how to speed up hardware and software construction in order to drive education modernization along with education digitalization; how to set up the lifelong learning “flyover” to improve the lifelong education system; and how to keep on improving the level of “teaching those who want to learn” so as to provide learners with several varied multi-level options to meet their diversified and individualized learning development needs. The annual work of the MOE also places its focus on “strengthening the construction of learning resources and platforms for continuing education, and strengthening system construction for learning outcomes accreditation, accumulation, and transfer”.
4. Situation Analysis
A calm analysis easily reveals a warm response from Chinese universities. This seems to come naturally as a result of the deep integration of information technology with education over the last 10 years. However, none of China's large scale educational achievement debuts has ever triggered such big waves as the arrival of MOOCs. This is closely linked with the problems and challenges faced by education and higher education development in China. The very purpose of this essay is this search for theoretical and practical exploration of MOOC's development in China.
4.1 Direct Motive
There are rigid demands and problems in the development of education and higher education in China, which lead directly to attention to and participation in MOOCs. There is huge rigid domestic demand for higher education in China, due mainly to China’s large population and continuous growth. Universities with the mission to provide higher education must take their responsibility seriously. At the forum on massive online education held by Tsinghua University in June 2013, MOE proposed fully realizing and positively coping with the opportunities and challenges brought by massive online education, closely following with interest the new development trend of international higher education, actively participating in and implementing global cooperation in online education, and accelerating the building of an online education platform in China from a strategic development perspective. In a sense, the development of China’s higher education may be said to be in a tight corner. Besides the lack of masters, as is often said, quality course resources are grossly inadequate. It should be noted that enormous and rich courses and even course systems have been established in relation to China’s higher education development to this day. Admittedly, the shortage of quality course resources is mainly due to the following five reasons. First, the delay in course concept and operation mode is basically the result of planned economic concept and mode. Second, the low starting point of course resource construction is historically unable to meet new expectations for higher education to develop at the necessary pace. Third, once course resources are established in China, they are used repeatedly for several years, with slow renewal cycles lagging behind fast social development and educational needs. Fourth, course resource construction is imperfect in China. Some course resources are actually left incomplete, with only lecture contents completed while lacking active links to relevant course resources. Fifth, quite a few course resources fall into the category “whatever is in the basket is a vegetable”, with lectures given by famous teachers and masters as well as quality course resources being quite scarce. Additionally, the closed nature of the system results in many courses that are lacking in vitality and relevant appeal, which causes many learners to lose interest. It’s been shown that the educator-led higher education model is gradually unable to keep pace with the learner-led education needs, with an ever widening divide between educational course design and learners’ needs.