4.36 million people, including employees, farmers, soldiers, disabled people, teenagers, senior students born in 1960s, people from China’s eastern coastal provinces, and people from ethnic minority areas or remote mountainous areas, make up the student body of the Open University of China (OUC).
How can we carry out ideological and political teaching in the face of such a huge, diverse group of online learners? In the process of the reform and innovation of ideological and politics courses, the OUC focuses on being oriented towards the needs of learners, leveraging its advantages, highlighting its unique features, and creating new learning experiences.
Highlight integrated course content and adhere to the learning concept of "ideology and politics"
From the perspective of the all-round development of students, the reform of the OUC's ideological and political curriculum aims to cultivate students' concept of "ideological and political education" from two dimensions: political consciousness and history and culture, and a "1 + 4 + X” integration scheme has been designed. "1" refers to a featured OUC course that highlights Xi Jinping's new socialist ideology with Chinese characteristics and has been an independent course since the autumn semester of 2018, earlier than the requirements to launch courses as stated in the Opinions on Deepening the Reform and Innovation of Ideological and Political Theory Course in the New Era issued by the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and General Office of the State Council of the People's Republic of China. "4" refers to four ideological and political courses specified by the Ministry of Education, and "X" stands for excellent traditional Chinese culture and ethnic theory and policy.
In terms of a strategy for curriculum construction, the OUC emphasises a theoretical framework that "follows one continuous line,” supported by two clues and two driving forces. On the one hand, starting from a horizontal comparison of political consciousness, it outlines two historical backgrounds and international patterns in Europe and China, and points out that the birth of Marxism has a profound social background. It has solved different problems in different countries and has achieved self-development. From an ideological point of view, it has followed “the same vein” in different countries, different historical stages, and under the influence of different historical figures. On the other hand, starting from the "deeply rooted" consciousness of Chinese people, it uses a theoretical framework with "one continuous line" to clearly explain the cultural origin and historical story of China, and stimulate national pride.
The five "1 + 4" courses are mainly presented in the form of five-minute videos. Nearly 400 micro-courses have been created for different special topics. Each micro-course is relatively independent, but also closely inter-linked. According to the needs of the courses, they can be combined like building blocks, reflecting an organic combination with the features of "granularity" and "logical relationship.”
Use a blockbuster production model to increase the attractiveness of course resources
Each knowledge point takes 5-10 minutes using the micro-courses, which mainly provide practical knowledge and focus on core elements such as audio, video, text, pictures, and animation, so that the facts and historical materials can speak for themselves. The content is presented using technical means so that the text in the books can be easily spread around.
The ideological and political micro-courses were produced with in the style of a blockbuster, playing down expert teaching and reducing theoretical focus, and instead emphasising situational learning, strengthening tracking back to the original point with the help of information technology, and breaking down values and theoretical comments into parts and integrating them into storytelling. Subjective ideology is expressed through objective facts, and a new teaching relationship based on student development has been established through invisible means.
By means of the discourse model of historical facts, the micro-courses, with their strong visual impact and real-life sense of historical scenes, trigger intense feelings in the learners, which in turn helps students to generate their own cognition.
Creating ideological and political micro-courses in the same style as producing a blockbuster not only represents a change in form, it is also a represents an innovation in the methodology. More importantly, it represents a change in the teaching method. It breaks through the traditional teaching model guided by knowledge inheritance and centred on cramming education. It is an effective way to realise the "student-centred" concept of teaching in the true sense.
Highlight the characteristics of students in course implementation and conduct teaching design based on "learning processes"
As a course resource that guides students in self-study, the ideological and political courses attach great importance to the guidance of self-directed learning process in the logical order of guidance, learning, testing, practice, and evaluation.
Before studying the core videos, a learning guide and video learning guide activity will be set up for students. Firstly, students will be given a clear learning path and the background of the subject they are learning will be clearly explained, so that students can start video learning with a clear thought process in mind. Through the study of important historical coordinates, students are guided to recognise the patterns hidden behind these important events, summarise historical experiences, and then use them understand and transform the world.
On the other hand, the troubleshooting section helps students to further summarise and improve their theories on the basis of their perceptual experiences, so that they can be the main body of information processing and become active builders of knowledge. Unlike routine teaching, which focuses on examination guidance, the troubleshooting section focuses on the analysis of difficult key points in the learning process. A number of case studies are designed in order to strengthen learning, while leaving clues for students who have effort to spare. The OUC has established a four-level management teaching team to provide effective guidance and communication for students. The overall design of teaching is arranged according to the advancing pace of the students' learning. In addition, a "one-stop" learning platform integrating learning and examinations, which can be synchronously accessed from PCs and mobile phones, has been created. Students can complete the whole learning process via their smart phone, embodying the educational concept of learning any time, everywhere. In the spring semester of 2019, a total of 1,670,700 students from 47 branches and six schools of the OUC participated in the study of ideological and political courses, with a total number of 764 million learning behaviours, 458 action per person, and 275,300 posts on learning exchanges.
Highlight learning processes during course evaluation and simulate learning behaviours through big data management
Ensuring the effectiveness of learning is a persistent problem for online learning. Therefore, after attracting the attention of students with blockbuster-style five-minute micro-courses, guarantee measures are also added at a technical level to stimulate learning behaviours.
During the learning process, each special topic is embedded with test questions to increase students' sense of participation. Before the students can answer the questions, they have to finish watching all of the videos on the topic at hand. Their formative assessment scores are then recorded, accounting for 50% of the total assessment scores. When a video is watched for the first time, the ability to drag the progress bar is disabled. Once learners leave a learning page, the video will stop playing automatically.
A progress bar is placed at the top of each course page to record learning progress. The platform can conduct detailed big data analysis of students' learning behaviours, which can then help establish learning files for each student in each branch, monitor the number of students online, their learning behaviours, and their posts or replies, and record the number of logins to each course, the number of posts and replies, the resources uploaded, and review teaching data, so as to provide an accurate basis for guidance, management, and improvement at later stages.
Formative assessments also include practical teaching, accounting for 20%. For example, exploring the May 4th spirit in the May 4th Square in Qingdao and experiencing modern Chinese history in the "Three Streets and Seven Lanes" in Fuzhou help to improve students' ability to observe, analyse social phenomena and apply theories, and enhance the timeliness of ideological and political teaching.
Since the reform of the OUC’s ideological and political courses in 2018, the students’ sense of gain has been greatly increased. It is generally believed that the course interface is accessible, the content is novel, learning is convenient, evaluation is reasonable, and that the relevance and attractiveness of the ideological and political courses have been greatly improved. The university has also signed resource use agreements with a number of universities and institutions and a sharing model has been established.
About the author: Xuan Hongqin is a tutor at the School of Marxism of the OUC. Liu Chen is deputy secretary of the Party Committee of the OUC and dean of the School of Marxism
By Xuan Hongqin and Liu Chen, China Education Daily