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Education minister says MOOCs allow everyone to learn whenever, wherever Countries and regions should promote open educational resources and
develop quality massive online open courses as digital public goods to
offer opportunities for learning to new audiences, education officials
and experts said. China is committed to further opening up its MOOC resources and
sharing its quality education resources with other countries and
regions, Education Minister Chen Baosheng said on Friday at the first
Global MOOC Conference, held online and offline at Tsinghua University
in Beijing. The country now ranks first globally in the number of MOOCs and viewers, he said. The conference was co-hosted by Tsinghua and the UNESCO Institute for
Information Technologies in Education, with the theme of "learning
revolution and higher education transformation". China started to build MOOC platforms in 2013, allowing people from
all over the country to take lessons simultaneously from anywhere, Chen
said. By October, the country had more than 30 MOOC platforms and 34,000
such courses. A total of 540 million people had participated in massive
online open courses, and 150 million university students had received
credits through them, he said. To cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, all Chinese universities moved
teaching online during the spring semester, with 1.08 million teachers
producing 1.1 million online courses, he said, adding that had laid a
solid foundation for promoting the innovative development of online
education and MOOCs. The unique advantages of MOOCs and online education have been
leveraged to promote educational equity and greater sharing of quality
educational resources so that everyone can learn whenever and wherever
they want, Chen said. "We should continue to improve the quality of MOOCs through
innovation and new technologies while also protecting privacy and
intellectual property through law and regulation," he said, adding that
MOOCs should be student-centered, with active participation encouraged
to ensure deep learning. Stefania Giannini, UNESCO's assistant director-general for education,
said the disruption brought by the pandemic forced educational
institutions in some 30 countries to close early this month, affecting
some 300 million students. Although MOOCs had already opened wide the gates to lifelong learning
before the COVID-19 crisis, at least one-third of students could not
access online platforms, and more than 7 million are at risk of not
pursuing their university studies for economic reasons, she said. If there is one lesson to take away from the pandemic, it is that
learners need their teachers, she said, adding that human interaction,
human touch and collaboration must remain at the core of the educational
process, including at the tertiary level. Countries should work together to ensure all learners are covered by
broadband connectivity, Giannini said, with better teacher training and
professional development key to the adoption of online environments and
the assessment of students. Andreas Schleicher, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development's director for education and skills, said the crisis had
exposed the many inadequacies and inequities in education systems. The pandemic had accelerated the application of educational
technology and transformation in teaching methods, and MOOCs could
enable teachers and students to access specialized material beyond
textbooks in multiple formats and in ways that bridge time and space, he
said. Qiu Yong, president of Tsinghua, said the pandemic had caused serious
damage to the education system and traditional education models, but it
had also empowered the first large-scale, well-organized and all-around
application of MOOCs as a new form of education. "The golden opportunity is right before us, so we should join hands
to face challenges, tap into potential opportunities and create new
journeys, striving to build universities with more openness, integration
and resilience," he said.
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