Editor's Notes: The Open University of China (OUC) has initiated a programme to nurture candidates for the inaugural session of "Outstanding Young Teachers," resulting in 104 teachers being bestowed with the esteemed title of "OUC Outstanding Young Teachers."
By sharing the stories of some of these young teachers and highlighting their experiences of learning and personal growth, our aim is to showcase the dedication and enthusiasm of all OUC teachers who are devoted to contributing to the establishment of a lifelong learning society for all.
Zhu Maoling, an associate professor and deputy director at Ningbo Open University, has been developing a career in open education for 20 years. She is a member of Accounting Society of China and Association of Accounting Lecturers in Ningbo, and inaugural member of OUC Outstanding Young Teacher. In 2019, she was selected as a candidate for Ningbo City Leading and Top-notch Talent Development Programme. Her project on teaching reform won the Special Contribution Award by Ningbo Open University and the second prize for teaching achievement. She has also won the first prize in a research paper competition on economics and management held by OUC, and the first prize in competitions regarding research papers on teaching, four times. Additionally, she has also won various titles several times, such as Excellent Class Teacher in the city, Advanced Worker in the University, Outstanding Communist Party Member.
To explore learner-centred teaching approaches with assorted activities and create disruptive innovation of the traditional classroom, to balance multiple roles and duties of learners in open universities with high quality learning experience, to pursue excellency by adopting a continuous improvement strategy, to cultivate the core competencies of students with focus on learning, to help enhance the reputation of the open university with high quality classes, during the joint cultivation of the candidates for outstanding young teachers, I set up a flipped-classroom studio which so far has run for more than two years.
Since 2015, I have been dedicated to researching ‘flipped teaching’ in practice, exploring a teaching method that effectively helps activate intrinsic motivation of learners and integrates cultivation of core competencies and highly efficient learning. Furthermore, our teaching team has applied the flipped teaching to the core courses for the accounting programme. In 2019, I was selected as a first-year candidate for the outstanding young teacher training programme. During the training, I acquired some relevant theories about distance education, online teaching and an innovative practice of the flipped teaching in a systematic way. Such experiences implanted an idea of studying the flipped classroom in a way that would emphasise both teaching and research. In 2021, Ningbo Open University decided to construct several studios for famous teachers. Thanks to my accumulated experience, I managed to apply for a flipped-classroom studio, which became part of one of the first collections of studios for famous teachers in Ningbo Open University.
Leveraging advantages brought by the OUC Outstanding Young Teachers Training Programme, along with my team, I kept tracking development of theories on online education, cutting-edge technologies in education, and teaching and development in innovative teaching regarding the flipped classroom at home and abroad. Furthermore, I had the opportunity to exchange ideas with many Chinese experts in the field of flipped-classroom research, which has brought new perspectives on innovative teaching. The headquarters of OUC organized outstanding youth teachers to visit Zhejiang University and Peking University for further learning, during which I grasped every opportunity to communicate with a few experts in education, to figure out the direction in which the flipped-classroom studio should develop. Because I valued continuous innovation of the teaching concepts, I was recruited to, and became a key player in the online teaching team for two core courses in the accounting programme provided by OUC, namely, Accounting System Design and Special Topics on Accounting Practice. The teaching team, fronted by me, adopted the flipped teaching model during the tutorial course designed to help learners pass the Accounting Title Certificate examination, and with over 200 learners from our course taking the National Accounting Title Certificate examination in 2019, the first-time pass rate was 4 times higher than the national average, and the student with the highest scores ranked 41st among more than 3 million examinees all over the country, winning a spot on the honour list by the Ministry of Finance specific to the examination. During the epidemic prevention and control period, to guarantee the epidemic containment and the teaching effect, I carried out all online teaching using the flipped classroom model, and won the first prize for the online classroom teaching competition with a distinguished performance.
The training programme advocated enhancements in both theory and practice. Therefore, I integrated the cultivation of core competencies of the learners in flipped teaching, and accomplished the report titled Construction and Practice of the Core-competencies-based Flipped-classroom Teaching Model in Accounting, which won the second prize for teaching achievement in the university. I also explored the construction of the learning community in the course of the flipped teaching, to provide guidance for preliminary preparation of the flipped teaching, and published the paper titled The Construction and Operation of the Learning Community in the Flipped Classroom. After in-depth exchanges with Professor Zhang Xuexin at Fudan University, the creator of PAD Class and the integration of the two effective teaching models, I wrote and published the paper titled Exploration into Online PAD-Flipped Teaching Model from the Perspective of Deep Learning. Besides, I have also tried to push the boundaries of the research centred on the flipped-classroom from multiple perspectives, and several projects on the teaching reform topic, fronted by me, have been carried out in an orderly way.
During the journey of pursuing excellence in teaching, the Flipped-classroom studio has been blessed with advice and guidance from leaders and colleagues at the headquarters of OUC, the Ningbo Branch. Thanks to your help, we carry out innovative teaching in a calm but determined way.
By OUC News Network