After a busy morning’s work, the student surnamed Liu in the OUC Sichuan Branch will hide himself inside the tea room during the lunch break, turns on his computer, puts on his headphone, logs onto the learning network of the Open University of China (OUC), and sets out to learn the course of investment science with earnest attention.

“This is a specialised course of the OUC’s major of finance, and it is rather hard”, said Liu. “Yet thanks to the forum on the learning network, I can ask questions on problems encountered during the course of learning in the forum, and get to know comrades and good friends learning the course together.” In this way, Liu has completed the learning of the two courses of Western Economics and Modern Management Principle by teaching himself. When talking of the learning network, Liu who has five years of work experience was lost in admiration saying, “The learning network is very convenient for course learning and formative assessment through direct mobile phone login when no computer is available. I have stricken a basic balance between work and learning, and I will get the long-waited undergraduate diploma soon.”

The OUC learning network represents a comprehensive teaching support platform for the students’ learning, the teachers’ teaching, and the institutions’ management, and it offers individualisedsupport and management platform for the three roles of “students”, “teachers”, and “institutions”. It is a service window of the OUC’s integrated development, and a data hub connecting enrollment, teaching affair, and examination business platform.

Birth of the learning network

From its pilot operation at the end of 2013 to its complete online in 2015, the learning network gradually covered all the provincial open universities or radio and TV universities, rendering full support to all the teachers and students.

To meet the needs of business transformation and to build the service platform of the six-network integration talent formation mode, the Department of Information Technology and all faculties and management authorities have worked together to optimise the learning network. Nearly 100 function points have been added. The courses deployed on the platform of the headquarters during the pilot period in the beginning have been increased from 4 to 1169, and the courses deployed in each provincial university were increased to 100 plus. There have been an increasingly array of course resources and teaching activities.

From stability to maturity

The OUC learning network is open 24 hours a day to the teachers and students, and the requirement is set high on the carrying capacity and stability of the platform itself. With the joint efforts of the teachers and students throughout the country and the great support from university leaders at all levels, the learning network has undergone steady operation and gradual maturity.

The gradual popularisation of the learning work has seen a continuous increase of browsing, logins, and choice selections in the spring and autumn semesters of 2017, and the spring semester of 2018.

By the 2018 spring term, there were as many as 9.72478 million student users, 59,931 teacher users and 11,228 management users registered in the learning network with about 60,000 daily logins.

Tendency of Logins on the Learning Network from the  Spring Semester 2017 to the Spring Semester 2018 (Unit: Login)

Student Course Selection Tendency on the Learning Network from the 2017 Spring Semester to the Spring Semester 2018 (Unit: Visit/Time)

The course leaders and provincial teachers in charge and tutors generally hold that the learning network has undergone many exchanges from its pilot to gradual maturity. The learning network has become a practical and easy platform for online teaching organization. By relying on the platform, administrators complete online teaching management and supervision, teachers complete online teaching organisation, and students complete formative assessment and course learning.

The statistical data analysis function in the learning space has facilitated course team building and regional management. The course leader supervises the behavior data of both teachers and students of a course, and is thus able to judge which provinces take the lead in online teaching. The leading provincial universities are popularised and their teachers are invited to share their experience with course team members. The discussions among the teachers are beneficial to improve the mutual learning among the teachers in the national system and the online teaching quality together.

Moreover, course leaders and head teachers can see which resources are the most interesting and useful to students based on browsing frequency, which helps teachers decide on resources, target their activities, monitor student progress, and encourage students who are falling behind. They can also calculate teacher remuneration, since the system keeps track of how much they work.

The online report-form management system allows administrators to keep track of teacher and student data in a way that is more practical than the traditional method, and lets them focus on the areas they need to enhance teaching quality and promote the enthusiasm of teachers.

The upgraded version, and the process of optimisation

In the spring semester of 2018, the network, which had been in operation for 5 years, was upgraded to a new version through the efforts of the Department of Information Technology. The homepage is now clearer and easier to grasp, with page views and numbers of requests at all branches for the preceding 24 hours made visible. Administrators are able to compare their own page views with those of other branches as a step toward optimisation.

As teaching reforms have progressed, the network’s services have continued to improve. Whereas in the past each individual course leader had to determine for him or herself the best teaching approaches, this process can now be centralised, so that the decision on what is best is spread out across the collaboration of the headquarters and branches, allowing for a unified vision that can be communicated to teachers throughout the system.

Students are the main users of the OUC network. In a survey of about 1500 students on its use, covering frequency, page layout, arrangement of functions, usefulness of modules, practicality and availability of the system, and so on, we learned that over 98% of the students are satisfied, representing a 10% improvement over the rating it received when it was first put online.

Because of the nature of an open university, the OUC network is essential to communication between teachers and students.

Student feedback for the Computer Assisted English Language Learning course led by Mr. Han Yanhui shows that students from Hebei, Hunan, Shanxi and Guangdong think its quality is high, which has changed their view of RTVUs.

Being able to move from hesitation and puzzlement at the beginning of a task to the calm of having completed it happens thanks to our excellent tutors.

This is high-quality education. I see the RTVU in a new light because of this, and have learned more useful things there than at university.

In the beginning, I wanted to give up, but the encouragement of my teachers gave me confidence.

Studying here has made me change my view of life. It is not about weakness or strength, but about attitude.

The students’ words show their eagerness to learn, their affection for their teachers, and their expectations of the courses. Their praise and suggestions have given the team great confidence, and helped clarify the future development of the network. The OUC Department of Information Technology will work with relevant departments to adopt the innovations of mainstream online platforms, continuing to offer support and services to students and teachers.

By Du haiyang, Xu Xinghua and Wu Yaqi, OUC