The Faculty of Foreign Languages of the Open University of China (OUC) held a seminar titled "Smart-teaching Forum for Regional Teacher Development and AI-empowered Smart English-language Teaching Reform" on 21 June 2022, the 10th anniversary of the university.
Over 130 people from nine institutions involved in the pilot programme gathered online to share their team-teaching experiences and discuss IT-based teaching reforms. Fan Xianrui, OUC vice president, and leaders of OUC branches involved in the educational-reform pilot programme attended.
Fan Xianrui noted that the seminar was significant for promoting the use of IT nationally within education, improving English-language teaching in open education, strengthening the professional development of regional OUC teachers, and building high-quality teacher teams. On 20 May 2022, the lifelong-education platform of the OUC entered trial operations, offering 588,000 learning resources to the public free of charge, and attracting widespread positive attention.
Fan Xianrui stressed that IT is both a basic support for open universities and an important basis of educational reforms. This project is not only a continuation of multimodal-teaching reforms, but also a new exploration of the use of AI in teaching. In relation to teaching reforms, she made three suggestions: to enrich resources, reform evaluation, and hold student competitions. She spoke in favour of "student-centred" teaching with a practical orientation, serving the mutual development of teaching and research, aiming to enhance English-language teaching and the quality of research, improving the ability of teachers to use IT, and promoting the development of open education.
Leaders of the nine institutions involved said that the teaching reforms will help students learn how to use the language and study it independently, while the teaching-design, student-support, research and IT abilities of teachers will be enhanced. The work will be based on the results of previous teaching reforms, as well as the use of IT, AI, and efficient approaches to training.
On the basis of previous reforms, and their own capacities and needs, the heads of the pilot programmes have set up their own plans related to language teaching and teacher development.
From 2017 to 2021, the OUC Faculty of Foreign Languages carried out teaching reforms based on the concept of "Multimodal Teaching". In 2022, together with the Information Technology Department, it will integrate the Ministry of Education’s "Pilot Project Promoting AI-based Teacher-team Construction", "5G + Smart Education", a joint pilot project of the MOE and the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the "Digital Teacher" project. It will use information technology to promote integration of IT-based educational concepts with subject teaching at the OUC, and help the university promote excellence.
Written by Li Chengcheng, Wan Minchen; Photos by Zhuge Huanyu, OUC