Which platform brings together 630,000 high-quality courses based on a founding mission of bringing high-quality education to the people?

The report delivered at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) clearly stated the need to promote the digitalisation of education and build a society and country of learning where lifelong education is pursued by all. On 20 May 2022, the Lifelong Education Platform of the Open University of China (OUC) was officially launched online, an open platform everyone to share. The platform used the key of digitalisation to open the door to lifelong learning to meet the diverse and personalised learning needs of different age groups, ranging from lifestyle to workplace skills, and contributing the OUC’s wisdom and approach to building a learning society where “everyone can learn anytime and anywhere”. Looking back on the last year, the Lifelong Education Platform has achieved remarkable results in terms of top-level design, infrastructure, digital resources, platform construction, and application exploration.

Promoting the Development of an Educationally Powerful Country Through the Digitalisation of Education

The OUC Party Committee has been resolutely implementing the digitalisation of education. It has developed an implementation plan for the university’s digital strategy, proposing four major tasks: digitalisation of learning resources, digitalisation of teaching processes, digitalisation of examinations and assessments, and digitalisation of management services. While advancing the “Six New” project concerning platform, environment, mechanism, evaluation, model, and ecosystem, it has studied and formulated the construction plan for the OUC Lifelong Education Platform based on the digitalisation transformation of the “Smart Learning Platform”. On 20 May 2022, the OUC Lifelong Education Platform was officially launched online. On 20 July 2022, the OUC Lifelong Education App was simultaneously launched on Android and IOS. On 28 July 2022, the platform underwent an upgrade, adding interactive functions such as liking, saving, commenting, taking notes, and providing feedback on courses. In March 2023, “Caring Mode” was introduced to support lifelong learning for older adults. In April 2023, the reading channel was launched, providing high-quality reading resources to help the public improve their reading abilities and enhance their cultural literacy. To date, the platform has launched 630,000 course resources, including 570,000 courses from renowned third-party platforms such as iQiyi, NetEase Cloud Classroom, and China Central Television, and 60,000 copyrighted audio and video courses owned by the OUC. It has collected 7,705 courses, including 79,993 audio and video resources, from 3,351 universities and educational institutions.

Building a New Ecosystem for Lifelong Learning for All

The OUC Lifelong Education Platform is committed to meeting the diverse and personalised learning needs of the public by empowering lifelong education with digital technology with the aim of accelerating the establishment of a lifelong education system that accompanies every individual throughout their life, making learning a habit and lifestyle for everyone, making universal learning available anytime and anywhere, improving the advancement mechanism of lifelong learning for all, and building a lifelong learning system that is more flexible, has more abundant resources, and makes learning more convenient. It covers six major areas: life skills, hobbies, workplace competencies, professional skills, elderly learning, and continuing education. In the year since its launch, the Lifelong Education Platform has provided learning services to over 26 million learners, organised nearly 30 special events with over 5 million participants, accumulated over 15,000 hours of learning, and established collaborations with 1,000 institutions offering learning resources. Many learners say that there is always a course suitable for if you come to the lifelong education platform, and it serves as a “treasure house” of learning resources. The OUC Lifelong Education Platform breaks down geographical barriers and overcomes spatial constraints to enable the sharing and exchange of high-quality resources, delivering learning resources to every knowledge-seeking learner. To meet users’ needs for mobile and flexible learning, the OUC Lifelong Education App was launch on Android and IOS simultaneously. The launch of the mobile app has greatly satisfied users’ need to learn “online anytime”, providing convenient access to knowledge. Learners can make use of small windows of time to grasp relatively complete knowledge chunks. Just like dealing with a pile of seemingly disordered knowledge fragments, with daily intake and accumulation, a complete picture of knowledge will eventually emerge. The Lifelong Education Platform’s 5-Minute Courses, in the form of “micro-classes”, allow users to “recharge” themselves all the time during breaks in their schedule. Interactive functions such as note-taking and course saving enable users to quickly locate the courses they want to learn. Users can read and study learning notes during wait times or commutes, referring to important knowledge points. In addition, the Lifelong Education Platform provides an intelligent customer service assistant. Users can ask the customer service assistant if they encounter problems while using the platform. On the one hand, the customer service assistant collects user questions, forms a database of problems, and continuously improves its intelligence through machine learning. On the other hand, if users encounter questions that the chatbot cannot answer, they can be transferred to a human customer service representative. As a responsible person from the OUC Lifelong Education Platform stated, “As an important measure for the OUC to implement the national education digitalisation strategy, in the future, we will continue to empower platform construction through information technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and big data. We will optimise the user experience by improving page structure, providing intelligent and precise recommendations, and enhancing learning service support.”

Serving the Country with Education, Undertaking the Mission by Practicing the OUC Spirit

The OUC has always been committed to serving the national strategy, promoting educational equity, and fostering a society of lifelong learning. It actively assumes social responsibilities and demonstrates the OUC spirit through the Lifelong Education Platform. In the past year, the platform has shown its dedication to the OUC spirit of serving lifelong learning for all. The platform has established a protection system for older adults and launched a “Caring Mode” to support lifelong learning for older adults. Considering the learning characteristics of older adults, the course setup and teaching methods have been optimised to make the courses more friendly to older adults, allowing middle-aged and older people to attend classes and track their learning progress at any time. A dedicated column called Smart Elderly Assistance has been created to help older adults acquire knowledge and skills in online learning, smart travel, and mobile shopping. The platform has also launched a special course section entitled “Forging Ahead on a New Journey and Making Achievements in the New Era: Learning and Implementing the Guiding Principles of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China”. It has also set up seven columns, including “Interpretation of the Guiding Principles of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China”, “Introduction to the Basic Principles of Marxism”, and “Centenary History of the Communist Party of China”. They cover 165 thematic course videos, including “The Spiritual Genealogy of Chinese Communists”, with over 870,000 views. This has helped unify the thinking and understanding of the social public with the guiding principles of the Party’s 20th National Congress and consolidate wisdom and strength in implementing the tasks outlined at the congress. Furthermore, the platform has created the “10,000 Open Courses Learning Activities of Community Education and Education for Older Adults” section, offering around 80,000 high-quality courses in community education and education for older adults, which has over 250,000 views. It has also launched the “Guarding Health through Epidemic Prevention for You” section, inviting frontline experts and scholars to provide professional knowledge on Covid-19 prevention and psychological counselling online, which has over 220,000 views. Additionally, a section on “April 15 National Security Education Day Learning” was launched online, inviting experts and scholars from renowned universities such as Peking University and Zhejiang University to help the public understand the overall concept of national security from a broader perspective, covering international relations, ecological and environmental security, financial security, population security, land security, and information security, which has over 970,000 views. Over the past year, the OUC Lifelong Education Platform has forged ahead amid social concerns and the expectations of the people. In the future, we will adhere to our original mission, respond to the needs of the times, listen to user feedback, and provide digitalised and professionally supportive teaching services at a higher level. Our aim is to make high-quality learning resources easily accessible, fostering a culture of lifelong learning for all. With the empowerment of education digitalisation for lifelong learning, we sincerely invite you to join us on this journey to embracing lifelong learning and growth and building a learning society and country hand in hand.

By OUC