Sun Houhong graduated from Shandong University in 1995 and has been teaching full-time at Wendeng District Radio and TV University (Wendeng RTVU) in Weihai City, Shandong province.

She has been named a “Top Teacher” of the city and been given a third-class merit by its government. She has helped make Wendeng RTVU one of the top RTVUs in Shandong province, and been named “excellent teacher”, “advanced individual of teaching affairs”, and “advanced individual in teaching management”. She has also published more than twenty academic papers in publications at or above the provincial level, and led or participated in more than a dozen Shandong RTVU research projects.

Over the past twenty years, her work has been strongly directed by the ideas of “service, responsibility and dedication” under the supervision of the CPC Wendeng RTVU Committee and the leadership of higher-level RTVUs. She approaches even the most ordinary tasks in a devoted and earnest spirit.

Dedicated to education

She is both a teacher and student, learning the principles of socialism and of public service, and striving to put what she has discovered about education to practical use. She focuses on teaching students based on their aptitude, and makes skillful use of multimedia and other modern teaching tools. Her modern educational ideas, scientific teaching methods, and rich teaching experience are well received by students. She is also pragmatic, innovative, and keen on reform.

Leading the reform of education

Sun Houhong is devoted to studying the theory and practice of open distance education and the latest achievements in her field. She has had achievements in online-teaching reform, course-resource construction, teaching-team building, and education research, playing a leading role in the provincial RTVU system.

Education and teaching reform

In terms of reform, Sun Houhong works hard to improve teaching so that it meets the individual needs of students in a way compatible with the reality of online open education, and has been a leader of pilot online classes at Wendeng RTVU.

In order to enhance online teaching, she has the teachers of those classes give written summaries of their teaching experiences and make suggestions for improvements. Over several semesters, student participation has reached a higher level than that to be found in face-to-face tutorials, while teaching has also improved. Use of the internet facilitates face-to-face question-and-answer exchanges, making it far superior to the one-way TV-based teaching that distance education traditionally consisted of.

Sun Houhong has also written about the gains teaching reform has enabled, and published several papers in Journal of Shandong Radio and TV University, including “Improving Online Teaching Through Implementation”, “New Approaches to Teaching Computerised Accounting at Wendeng RTVU”, “Online Teaching Reform and Innovation”, and others.

Construction of course resources

Sun Houhong has taken the advanced classes in online-course construction offered by the headquarters of the Open University of China, and received intermediate-level certification as an expert in online courses, Lectora courseware, Lectora-certified lectures, and so on. She has also received online-education training from China Central Radio and TV University, and obtained learner-support certification.

While strengthening her professional qualifications, she has won numerous awards for her teaching resources. Those for Computer Application Basics came second in the “Fourth Multimedia Courseware Competition” of Shandong Radio and TV University; for Computerised Accounting won the “Second Teaching Innovation Award” of Shandong Radio and TV University; for Accounting Information Systems: Financial Accounting came third in the Shandong RTVU “Online Courseware Competition”; and for Introduction to Shandong Culture came second in the Shandong RTVU “Teaching Courseware Production Competition”. In Shandong RTVU “Micro-course Competitions”, her winning courses included Drug Safety, Traditional Culture and Steamed Cakes of East Shandong, and Excel Data Analysis, while Computerised Accounting, Decimal-to-Binary Conversion, and Application of the VLOOKUP Function in Teaching-affairs Management all came second.

Research on education and teaching

She has been active in research as well, and published more than twenty academic papers. Those published in Journal of Shandong Radio and TV University include “Reform of Pre-graduation Intensive Practica at Regional Radio and TV Universities”, “Recent Problems in Rural Community Education, and their Solutions”,and “Degree-education Credit Transfer at Open Universities: a Case Study of Wendeng Radio and TV University”. In CNKI Net academic journals she has published “Promoting Community Education as Continuing Education: a Preliminary Study”, “Using Community Education in Rural Areas to Solve Problems with Agriculture”, “Rural Areas and Farmers”, “Developing Community Education to Promote Rural Labour-force Flexibility”, “Curriculum Development in Rural Community Education”, “Credit-transfer Design at Open Universities: a Preliminary Study”, “Integrating Micro Courses, MOOCs, and the Flipped Classroom in the Teaching of Computer Science”, and “Promoting the Construction of Digital Learning in the RTVU System”.

She has also led several research projects, covering areas such as the use of information technology, the promotion of community continuing education, the use of community education to develop a flexible rural labour force, the curriculum design and development of rural community education, the management and operations of education of older adults, the “three-in-one” education model, family and society, degree-education credit transfer at Shandong Open University, and the construction of a digital learning community in the RTVU system.

Prominent in developing online teaching

Sun Houhong has been an important part of the development of online education at Wendeng RTVU, where she received considerable acclaim for contributing her experiences at major meetings on the subject in 2004 and 2009.Under her lead, teachers have published two reports on online teaching at Wendeng RTVU in separate issues of the Journal of Shandong Radio and TV University. From 2013 to 2015, she was invited several times to train Shandong RTVU teachers in online teaching and teaching management, and in 2017, she did the same for online assessment. She received a special invitation from Shandong RTVU to participate in teaching supervision as a member of the teaching-expert group.

Promoting service innovation

To help standardise management, she has arranged for teachers to participate in over twenty research projects at Shandong RTVU, as well as in Shandong RTVU competitions related to multimedia courseware, online courseware, micro-lectures, and so on, in which over 100 teachers have won prizes. She has also organised training sessions in modern distance-education teaching methods, which help enhance student enthusiasm and teaching quality. The university has been named an “Advanced Collective of Open Education”, “Advanced Unit of Online Teaching”, and “Advanced Collective of Teaching Management” by Shandong RTVU.

By OUC Voice WeChat Official Account