On November 21-22, the China International Distance Education Conference 2013 took place in Beijing. The conference, whose theme was “Openness, Integration and Innovation – Online Learning Opening the Door to the Age of Lifelong Learning”, focused on the new mode, new strategies and new opportunities for online learning development, and especially discussed new thinking, new methods and new measures of the way that online learning is pushing forward the establishment of a lifelong learning system and the construction of the structures of continuous lifelong learning.Ge Daokai, Director-General of the Department of Vocational and Adult Education of the Ministry of Education (MOE), delivered a speech entitled “Innovation in Lifelong Learning”. He noted that to open the door to the new age of lifelong learning for the whole population required the whole society to adopt the idea of lifelong learning, pay attention to the lifelong learning for all, construct a system for accreditation, accumulation and transfer of learning outcomes, establish structures for continuous lifelong learning, push forward various learning resources integrating with and shared by the whole society, and effectively take advantage of information technology to meet the needs of individualized learning. He stressed that the development of lifelong learning is our mission during an age of educational development and reform, and that to develop lifelong learning reform must be pushed forward, and that the application of information technology is the important method to develop lifelong learning.
Tang Min, Counselor of the State Council and economist, raised several questions in a speech, whose title was “How to Catch the Bus to Online Educational Reform”. He discussed whether for China MOOCs will make education even better or provide help at the right time, and whether it only means the professor teaching online or whether it creates a new kind of education, and whether we should follow our predecessors or blaze a new trail of our own. Then he suggested that China should exploit the advantages of concentrating resources to accomplish large undertakings to the full, and apply online learning to solve the problems of out-moded teaching contents and methods and to relieve the problems of insufficient faculty resulting from the expansion plan of higher education.
Yang Zhijian, President of the Open University of China (OUC), stated in his speech, “Based on the Internet – An Effective Path”, that humans and their existing style of the Internet living means, that online learning is becoming the trend, and that the effective path for lifelong learning is based on the Internet. He raised two other aspects -- the broad responsibility of and the efforts made by the OUC. Yang especially talked about the great efforts that have been made by the OUC in the collection of digital resources, the construction of online core courses, the development of five-minute courses, free resource promotion and so on. The OUC Digital Learning Resources Centre devotes itself to promoting the formation of lifelong learning for all and the learning society. For now, the point of focus is to achieve the collection and promotion of digital resources based on the Internet. In 2013, “Courses Based on Online Learning – Internet Core Courses” launched 100 professional core and major courses, with a future goal of 400. Following the trend of lifelong learning for all, the OUC is developing the “five-minute courses” in a large scale to meet diverse, individual and fragmentary learning needs of different learners, of which 5,000 have now been finished covering the fields of literature and art, history and culture, science and technology, economics and management, politics and law, etc. The resources are made available to the whole society for nothing through the several established non-profit free special websites, include ouchn.edu.cn, lawlearner.net, cunguan-edu.cn, sannong.com.cn, dianxi.nerc-edu.com/dx/default.aspx and so on.
Cheng Jiangang, Chairman of the Society of International Chinese in Education Technology and the subject head and academic leader of Education Technology in Tsinghua University, Mohamed Ally, the co-founder of the International Association for Mobile Learning and the former Chairman of the Canadian Society for Training and Development, Zhang Yueqiang, Chief Inspector of the Personnel Management and Solution in ORACLE China, Guo Jinming, the President of Shanghai LANTOP Education Information Technology Co., Ltd., and Huang Bo, Chairwoman of the ChinaEDU Corporation also gave speeches on “The Dialectic Analysis of MOOCs and A Study on M-MOOCs”, “Mobile Learning and Innovative Education”, “Cloud Services Helps HR to Create More Value”, “The Service Operation Model during the Process of Education Digitization”, and “Welcome the Future Shock - Are You Ready?” respectively.
The programmes of the meeting also included “Forum for the Deans of Online Schools at Regular Universities”, “The OUC Construction Forum”, “ Forums for Enterprise E-Learning Excellent Practice and the Construction of Corporate Universities”, “Forum for Cross-Strait Digital Learning Cooperation”, “Forum on MOOCs and Online Learning”, “Forum on Corporate E-Learning and the Development of New Technology”, “Forum on Mobile Learning and the Application of New Products”, “Forum on Government Training and Education of Cadres”, “A Round Table on National Education Cloud Platform Resource Sharing and Business Cooperation”, “Forum on Micro-Courses and the Construction of Resources”, “Forum on the Innovative Development of Regional RTVUs”, “Vocational Education and Digitization Summit Forum” and so on.
This conference was held under the guidance of the National Modern Distance Higher Education Cooperative Group and the OUC, and organized by Distance Education in China. Liu Ying and Huang Hui, directors of the Department of Vocational and Adult Education of the MOE, and Yan Jichang, Secretary-General of the National Modern Distance Higher Education Cooperative Group attended the conference. Nearly 1,600 people from online schools at regular universities, corporate universities, the OUC, and the Radio and TV Universities at provincial and prefectural levels participated in the conference.
Nearly 500 foreign and domestic educational training institutions and service providers showed the latest products and technological achievements at the conference, including the “Cloud Computing” Platform by ORACLE (China), Micro-Class by LANTOP, “Cloud Video Distance Learning Solutions” by POLYCOM, “Online Video Distribution Scheme” by Lenovo, “Qingshu PAD” by the School of Distance and Continuing Education of Southwest Jiaotong University, “Virtual Classroom System” by Gensee, “Micro-Study Platform” by Weixue Technology, “Courseware Workshop” by iTVOO, etc., and presented new concepts, new technology, and new approaches from different perspectives, bringing a new experience.
By He Jing, the OUC