A ceremony to sign a Memorandum of In-depth Strategic Cooperation between the Open University of China (OUC) and Beijing Radio and Television (BRTV) was held in Beijing on the morning of 9 July 2021.

Jing Degang, secretary of the Party Committee and President of the OUC, and Yu Junsheng, deputy secretary general of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), deputy director of the Publicity Department of the CPC Beijing Municipal Committee, secretary of the Party group, and president of BRTV, gave speeches at the ceremony. Li Linshu, OUC vice president, and Bian Jian, deputy editor-in-chief of BRTV, signed the agreement on behalf of the two parties.

Jing Degang pointed out that the OUC and the BRTV will be guided by the important speech of 7 July by General Secretary Xi Jinping, bringing Party history and practical education to the general public. The two sides, as educators, can find synergies as they work to promote lifelong learning, building and sharing of high-quality learning resources, and exploration of new models of education that involve use of information technology and online classes, with the ultimate goal of making China’s second centennial a successful one.

Yu Junsheng noted that the BRTV and OUC, similarly positioned as sources of public education, shoulder important responsibilities in terms of enhancing cultural literacy and cultivating socialist core values, and have complementary strengths in terms of content production and communication. They should establish integrated and expanded communication and featured programmes while aiming for practical results, emphasising cooperation over expansion, and focusing on cultural literacy and the overall enhancement of education.

At a forum before the ceremony, leaders and staff of the Party and Administration Office, the Learning Resources Department, the Faculty of Education, the School of Marxism, and the OUC University for Older Adults, as well as leaders and staff of the BRTV office, the Convergence Media Centre, the Story-broadcasting Centre, and Beijing Xunting Network Technology, had in-depth exchanges on previous and future collaborations.

The OUC, as a provider of education and other services to people of all ages and backgrounds, has accumulated a large number of high-quality audio and video resources covering many fields, while the strengths of the BRTV, as a mainstream media-provider in China’s capital, lie in collecting, editing and broadcasting content. In 2020, the OUC programme "Quality Lectures by Famous Teachers" was strongly supported by the BRTV, which broadcast them via Tingting FM, its official audio app, establishing a good foundation for strategic cooperation. In the first half of 2021, the two sides continued to work hard on constructing and sharing audio courses, and launched to acclaim "Lectures on Ideological and Political Education" at the OUC and an audio edition of "Quality Lectures by Famous Teachers".

In the future, the two sides will continue to work together to develop high-quality content in line with the new-media-communications law, jointly launch high-quality media courses in a variety of fields, and carry out in-depth cooperation in terms of expert collaborations and promotion of resources. It is hoped that the learning resources of the OUC will be more widely disseminated with the help of the BRTV, offering the public both quality and convenience.

By Zhou Xiang, OUC