From 25-30 September 2018, the Open University of China (OUC) held an advanced seminar for its quality control and evaluation staff.
The purpose of the seminar was to focus on quality, promote the construction of quality management staff in the OUC’s organisational system, realise the professional development of quality control and evaluation staff, keep pace with the university's transformation from scale development to connotation construction, and promote the standardisation of the educational process and the improvement of the education and teaching quality of the OUC as a new type of university system with mutual forces from multiple sides. Lin Yu, vice president of the OUC, presented certificates to the graduating students.
The seminar, sponsored by the OUC’s Headquarters Department of Student Affairs and Teachers’ Development and organised by the Quality Supervision and Evaluation Centre, attracted more than 100 teachers engaged in quality control and related work from 11 schools in 45 branches of the OUC in 31 provinces.
Liu Chengbin, a researcher at the Higher Education Department of the Beijing Municipal Education Commission and executive vice editor of the Report on Continuing Education Development of Colleges and Universities in Beijing; Huang Dehui, chief project director of Hong Kong Polytechnic University and vice chairman of the IC Teaching Quality Assurance Committee; and Wang Li, director of the Data Mining Centre of the McCos Company, gave reports from the perspective of national policy spirit, the current situation, problems and trends in the development of China's continuing education cause, trends in quality assurance work in Hong Kong and the world against the macro background of vocational education, and the use of data mining and statistics and analysis for quality evaluation work.
Li Yi, director of the Teaching Monitoring and Evaluation Centre of the OUC Zhejiang Branch; Zuo Kejun, deputy director of the Academic Affairs Department of the OUC Jiangsu Branch; Ye Zugeng, secretary of the Party Committee and president of Ningde College of the OUC Fujian Branch; and He Xuefen, director of the Academic Affairs Department of Changzhou College of the OUC Jiangsu Branch, shared their innovative practices and practical experience of carrying out quality control work.
Han Yi gave a work report on the topic of Focus on Development, Upgrade our Abilities, and Carry out Teamwork in Building a New Quality Cultural Card for the OUC. She said that we should successfully run continuing education, implement the spirit of the Nineteenth National Congress of the CPC, coordinate with the key tasks of the OUC, unite the efforts of the OUC system, bring the role of the quality assurance team into full play, introduce expert think tanks, jointly safeguard the reputation of the universities within the system, build an education brand, and strive to build a quality culture with the unique characteristics of the OUC and a new brand of quality culture by focusing on the improvement of quality.
Ice breaking and workshop links were included in the seminar and practical trainings on daily data processing software and related skills were also carried out.
In his speech at the graduation ceremony, OUC vice president Lin Yu made three requests for the OUC’s quality assurance work. Firstly, he emphasised the importance of quality assurance. He said that the OUC should understand evaluation work from four perspectives: promoting standardisation, improving conditions, enhancing training quality, and advancing teaching reform. It should also promote OUC teaching reform through quality assurance work and establish a quality assurance mechanism according to the characteristics of the OUC school-running system. Second, the focus should be on the diversity of modern quality assurance methods. It is necessary to make full use of modern information technology to improve the ability and effect of finding problems, excavate, and utilise existing data, and strengthen monitoring of data in process. Thirdly, attention should be paid to handling the relationship between "temporary" and "daily" work in quality assurance. He also pointed out that according to the characteristics of the new university and its service objectives, we should not only pay attention to the individual characteristics of the work of running the university, we should also care about enhancing pertinence in school running and quality assurance work. In view of the OUC’s model of school running and teaching, quality assurance work should be an issue considered by the whole of the OUC system and a direction to be thought about by quality assurance practitioners.
By Cui Ming,OUC