Today's world has entered the digital society, and digital skills have become essential skills that people cannot do without. What is a learning society? A learning society is a society that promotes and guarantees the continuous and active learning of its members through corresponding public services to adapt to and surpass rapidly changing technology and environments.

Its core content is lifelong learning for all, and its basic features are that everyone can learn anytime and anywhere. This is consistent with the functional positioning and historical mission of open universities, especially in the digital age. Open universities should actively play a role in the deep integration of information technology and education, actively promote digitalisation of education, and actively serve the construction of a learning society and a learning-oriented country.

"Digitalised University" is different from "University Digitalisation". University digitalisation is the use of digital means to improve the teaching and management capabilities of traditional universities, such as improving campus information services and building smart campuses. Digitalised university is a structural reconstruction and reconstruction of the entire educational system of universities, including education philosophy, organisational form, university system, and learning methods, under the digital thinking and environment. University digitalisation is a physical form based on capabilities, while digitalised university is a value form based on innovation. Currently, to achieve the goal of lifelong learning for all, it is necessary to rely on modern information technology, empower citizens with digital skills, optimise resource utilization, eliminate the digital divide and education inequality, achieve accessibility and affordability, and establish a new educational ecology of lifelong learning. Therefore, it is necessary to focus on building a digitalised university to assist in the construction of a learning society and a learning-oriented country.

Massive and useful learning resources easy to learn are gathered to meet the consistent and diverse learning needs of the people. With the goal of achieving universal access to learning for anyone, anytime and anywhere, we will continue to build and gather a greater variety of high-quality digital learning resources across multiple fields, fully satisfying the learning needs of students, and ensuring that "there is always a course that suits you". We will adhere to the principles of having renowned teachers guide and deliver useful and easy-to-learn materials to ensure the quality of learning. We will also explore new forms of course resources such as multimedia teaching materials, virtual simulations, and new courses to empower the iteration and upgrading of digital resources with new technologies. We will promote the joint construction and sharing of high-quality digital resources through interconnection and intercommunication. We will enhance digital management capabilities and strengthen the quality evaluation of learning resources. Through technologies such as knowledge maps and big data analysis, we will realise intelligent resource recommendation and whole-process evaluation. Putting learners at the centre, we will promote diversified and personalised services, implement "teaching according to individual needs," and serve lifelong learning for all to fully meet the diverse learning needs of the public.

Advance the digitalisation of the teaching process and continuously improve the learning outcomes and quality for learners. Increase funding and actively create conditions for learners to learn conveniently, easily and efficiently. Build digital teaching environments such as 5G smart classrooms, 5G holographic classrooms, VR labs, and virtual broadcasting studios, and construct intelligent teaching methods that integrate online and offline learning. Set up powerful next-generation learning platforms to support large-scale, end-to-end, and all-scenario online teaching and learning. Use big data and artificial intelligence technology to achieve real-time monitoring of the teaching process and teaching data governance, and to provide intelligent recommendations, intelligent Q&A, and personalised accurate services, forming a service architecture of "tailored teaching to individual needs". Leverage the nationwide network teaching team to promote the sharing of high-quality teaching staff within the educational system, enable cross-regional teaching and tutoring, ensure the effectiveness of teaching, improve the attractiveness and influence of teaching, and strive to enhance the quality of education and teaching.

The digitalisation of examinations and assessments has been ushered in for continuous expansion of self-testing and self-disciplined learning.  A large-scale online smart exam platform is built to promote the construction of digital question banks, and realise the full-process digitalisation of registration, exam implementation, and score management, providing flexible and convenient exam services such as autonomous scheduling and on-demand exams. Use technologies such as facial recognition, remote video monitoring, and intelligent proctoring to achieve "one-photo verification" for student check-in, proctor entry, and teacher grading, ensuring the quality of education. Meanwhile, for learners who do not require academic qualifications, single-course registration or modular knowledge learning is provided, and self-testing can be conducted to fully experience the convenience and benefits of digital learning.

The digitalisation of management and services is developed for consistent empowerment of flexible and convenient learning services. Through digitalisation, we will promote the accuracy, flexibility, and personalisation of school management and services. We will build a fully digitalised teaching and management system that covers all aspects of talent development, scientific research, social services, cultural heritage, and international exchange. We will promote a shift from "process-driven" to "data + process" dual-drive, enabling dynamic monitoring, early warning, trend analysis, and decision-making assistance for core data. This will provide better data support for policy-making and enable flexible management actions through human-machine collaboration. We will provide personalised learning, teaching, and management services through artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other technologies. This will enable machines to serve teachers and students, and ensure that "every teacher has an assistant, and every student has a study buddy." By leveraging big data analytics systems, we will optimise learning service processes, support large-scale, high-concurrency, safe, and convenient online education applications. Our goal is to make it so that people can easily access and enjoy learning services, with minimal effort required.

Author: Jing Degang

Reprinted from Study Times