21st Century Business Herald:

We have noticed that the MOE implemented the national education digitization strategy last year and has made positive progress, and the national Smart Education of China platform won the 2022 UNESCO ICT Prize. What are the plans going forward to further implement the education digitization strategy? Thank you.

Huai Jinpeng:

Thank you for your question. I'm happy to answer. The digitization of education is an important part of modernizing education. We hosted the World Digital Education Conference this February, with more than 130 countries and regions participating. At the conference, I also talked with international education workers and researchers about China's thinking and practice on "digital transformation and the future of education." On the basis of the last decade, the MOE fully implemented the national education digitization strategy last year to provide society with a streamlined, efficient, safe and reliable digital education platform through typical applications with a focus on service. The basis of our work is "connection first, content-based and cooperation-prioritized," which in English is the "three Cs"— "connection, content and cooperation." This means that we are strengthening the integration of advantageous education resources across the country through cooperation, and jointly advancing the digitization and modernization of education through effective cooperation of both domestic and global education resources. We hope to pool China's quality resources, digitalized resources and our wisdom based on past development, or "string pearls into a necklace" metaphorically speaking. We hope to raise its value, transfer its energy and better serve and support the development of education.

Since the platform launched one year ago, more than 200 million youngsters have studied online, especially in remote mountainous areas and rural areas, where they can access high-quality educational resources from Shanghai, Beijing, as well as Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. As Mr. Liu mentioned just now, the quality and balance of compulsory education has been achieved. We have achieved the balanced allocation of advantageous resources, which we did not manage in the past. Since its launch, the platform has received more than 26 billion visits, making it the world's largest resource pool for education and teaching. You also mentioned that China's practice of the digitization and modernization in education was fully acknowledged by UNESCO, winning a UNESCO prize.

The report to the 20th National Congress of the CPC states that we should advance digitization in education, build a learning society and a major learning-oriented country where people can keep studying life-long. The general secretary noted during his keynote speech on May 29 that digital education is where our country can achieve breakthroughs in opening up new areas and forming fresh strength of educational development, and emphasized more should be done to encourage digital education to provide effective support for personalized learning, life-long learning, expanding the reach of quality educational resource and modern education.

In practice, we continue to improve our efforts on related work, such as the massive open online courses (MOOCs) program in western areas, which has provided more than 190,000 MOOCs and customized courses for universities in western China, giving strong support for talent training in universities in western areas. We helped open more than 4.46 million courses with mixed teaching models there, and students have taken 495 million courses. For example, at the end of last month, when we held an on-site promotional event for national education digitization in Wuhan, we noticed that a course on electronic circuit systems at Tsinghua University was connected with universities at Beijing, Wuhan and Guizhou. As a public basic course, students can all share in the same class, ask questions at the same time and answer them together. It was difficult to achieve this in the past. There is an old saying: "the peacocks fly southeast." While promoting education services in China's central and western regions, especially during the last decade and the past five years when stronger efforts have been made, education in China has shown a unique climate whereby "the peacocks fly northwest." Education workers from universities in eastern China and Beijing go to universities in the western regions to support local construction. They are not only serving as presidents or professors, but also working with local researchers to form teams and research forces in higher education, providing services for the regional economies and talent development. At the same time, we also have corresponding assistance in vocational colleges where we still have room to boost efforts to improve the fairness and quality of education. Of course, we have also seen the effective use of digital resources, which is of great significance to better serve the whole society.

In the next step, we will focus on four aspects: First, we will build a national big data center for the digitalization of education and make it an important platform for us to provide high-quality resource services, a national digital education resource sharing center, a gathering center for public educational services, and a management and evaluation center for digital resources. Digitization is not just about technology, nor is it just a platform or about turning resources into numbers. More importantly, it will leverage our education reform and genuinely serve students' learning and development, support teachers' education and teaching activities, and enhance schools' management and governance capabilities. Additionally, It will improve our research capabilities in education modernization in the new era.

Second, we will enhance the use of big data in education and teaching activities. At present, many people pay much attention to artificial intelligence's impact on education. Starting with digitization and intellectualization, there is no big data, no big model, and no effective application combined with vertical fields to improve education's comprehensiveness and accuracy. Therefore, it requires new methods. In this regard, we need to intensify efforts to strengthen education and teaching empowered by big data, better promote the balance of high-quality resources, and better serve the comprehensive development of people and the improvement of education capabilities. At the same time, we will use such a platform to improve teachers' abilities. Last year and this year, during the winter and summer vacations, teachers were provided with online digital learning to strengthen the service of their teaching activities and the cultivation of students. In this respect, basic, vocational and higher education have all yielded good results. Since the beginning of this year, we have used digital education to empower rural education pilots to better organize and allocate resources. We have organized nearly 100 volunteers from four colleges and universities to leverage the national smart education platform to target more than 1,600 students in four key rural revitalization counties to conduct digital education assistance experiments. These practices play an important role in young people's digital literacy and technological knowledge skills, as well as in improving teachers' teaching activities. During this experiment, we provided digital support and experience through the two categories of information technology and art for a total of 190 class hours. There are imbalances and incoordination in this regard. However, the chances of achieving better coverage capabilities are greatly increased, and we will continue to strengthen our work in this area. 

Third, we will enhance the ability of education to deliver effective public services. The National Smart Education Platform provides a public service platform that is not only for learning and improving teachers' skills but also provides public service products for all students and society. For example, by the end of June, a total of 95 special recruitment sessions had been provided for this year's fresh graduates, collecting 16.24 million pieces of job information and providing 16.24 million jobs for 11.58 million fresh graduates on the National 23456 Graduate Employment Service Platform. As I previously stated in my response to the question from the Wall Street Journal reporter, for students with special difficulties, according to the requirements of the central government and social expectations over the years, the employment rate of students from families with difficulties is 2 to 3 percentage points higher than that of students in the normal system. Therefore, we need to support some students who have difficulties getting employed. And we need to respect some students who have flexible choices. In addition, some students have new pursuits and considerations. So besides providing learning, digital education platforms should strengthen their public service capabilities by employing tools such as MOOCs, micro-classes, and virtual reality. Moreover, they should utilize virtual reality and augmented reality technologies to enhance areas that were previously challenging to experiment with and required hands-on abilities. This is an extension of modern education through digital education platforms. These platforms are not simply about moving textbooks and classrooms online; they provide enhancements with new service functions and capabilities.

Fourth, we will strengthen the internationalization of digital education. As an open country, we believe China should share its educational resources, capabilities, models, and methods with the world. We also call on the world to share educational achievements, clues, and education modernization efforts to provide effective and better resources to people and students across the globe, which is also an important basis for better open cooperation and people-to-people exchanges. We also expect and continue to strengthen exchanges and cooperation between China and our international counterparts in digital education. Developing digital education, promoting education digitalization, and advancing education modernization are the trends of our times, the need for development, and the direction of reform. We have accumulated experience in this area and discovered new problems. We also found that it is extremely important for constructing a leading country in education in the future. We will continue to work hard in this regard. At the same time, it is an important supporting aspect of a learning society and lifelong learning. Therefore, in these aspects, we will be more oriented and focus on educating the elderly, building more open universities, and better providing a learning environment for the whole society where one does not necessarily go to school. For example, youth literacy activities are carried out through this method so that everyone can learn at any time, anywhere. Digital education is not only a technology and platform but also a public service and an important aspect of supporting the future learning society. It is also a crucial aspect that needs to be studied and taken into consideration for future policies and systems.

Thank you for your question.