On 26 December 2018, a meeting to summarise the multimodal teaching reform pilot work of the Open University of China's (OUC) new public English course in autumn 2018 and a preparatory meeting for the second round of pilot start-up work was held in Handan, Hebei Province. Some of the students from the pilot multimodal teaching reform also put on a performance.

Liu Chen, deputy secretary of the OUC Party Committee, gave a speech at the meeting. He introduced the development and achievements of the OUC from the aspects of the school-running system, curriculum development, the "Six-Network Integration” learner development model, system structure, credit bank, and international exchanges. He emphasised that we should comprehensively implement the spirit of General Secretary Xi Jinping's speech at the National Education Conference and train socialist builders and successors who have all-round morality, intelligence, physical fitness, beauty, and labour, who possess "a Chinese face" and "love for China", and who understand "Chinese conditions" and "Chinese tradition, culture, and characteristics", so as to make new and greater contributions to accelerating the construction of a learning-oriented society and vigorously improving national quality.

Liu Chen praised the multimodal teaching reform of the OUC’s new public English course. He put forward requirements for the second round of teaching reform, asking teachers to be conscious of realising the “balanced and equitable education” put forward by General Secretary Xi Jinping and to implement the concept of “bringing universities into the society” and the "Six-Network Integration" learner development model.

Representatives from five branches engaging in pilot programmes in Hebei, Guangdong, Qingdao, Gansu, and Shenzhen gave summary reports on the pilot work of educational reform. Since spring 2017, online, mobile, mixed, and other teaching models have been innovated in the pilot work, important breakthroughs have been made in team building, teaching design, learning situation analysis, and scientific research and exploration, and an effective learning model has been constructed based on the OUC’s branches engaging in the pilot programme supported by a cross-regional teaching team and backed by student support services.

In the evening, the Handan branch held a show to demonstrate the results of the pilot multi-modal teaching reform programme. More than 20 students from the pilot class performed English songs, English film dubbing, English plays, and English poetry recitations. The programme was varied and enthusiastic, and the students’ English fluent, fully demonstrating the students' English capability and broad international horizons.

With the successful completion of the first round of pilot work, the second round will be launched in spring 2019.

Du Shujie, vice mayor of Handan, Hebei Province, and Deng Mingli, president of the OUC Hebei branch, attended the meeting. Representatives from Beijing, Sichuan, and Guangdong who will participate in the second round of pilot projects attend the meeting, which was chaired by Liu Zhanrong, deputy director of the OUC Faculty of International Languages and Cultures.

By Liu Ning,OUC