Five-Minute Lectures (http://wfz.nerc-edu.com/), a new website designed by the Open University of China (OUC), was officially launched on July 3, 2013 by professor Li Defang, secretary-general of the National Networked Consortium for the Education of Teachers, Feng Xuefei, president of Tianjin RTVU (OUC Tianjin Branch), and Li Linshu, vice president of the OUC.
At the end of 2012, the OUC launched the “Five-Minute Lectures” project to better promote the integration of information technology and education, adapt to the diversity of degree and non-degree education, satisfy the learning needs of different learners, and facilitate the construction of a learning society in which everyone pursues life-long learning.
“Five-Minute Lectures” promotes a new kind of video lecture that lasts only 5-10 minutes, enabling students to learn in their spare time. Characterized by brevity, concision and mobility, five-minute teaching videos make learning available to anyone who possesses a mobile learning device, making it an important form of knowledge transmission in the mobile Internet era.
Until today, the OUC has completed more than 3,600 five-minute lectures. The lectures can be divided into more than 50 series, including “Poetry Appreciation”, “Acupoint Message” and “Western Economics”. These lectures can be classified into 10 categories according to their content, including literature and arts, history and culture, philosophy and social science, education and sports, language and characters, economic management, scientific technology, agriculture and farming, and leisure.
As an essential component of the “Five-Minute Lectures” project, the new website provides a series of learning columns, such as “Learning Space”, “Special Topics”, “Famous Teachers”, “Institutions”, “Resources Sharing”. This website also helps institutions and individuals to upload and share learning resources. Serving as a public platform to collect, share and learn short, concise online learning resources, it also promotes the construction of a lifelong learning society, satisfies individual learning needs, and stimulates the development, acceptance and application of high-quality digital learning resources.
The OUC aims to complete a total of 10,000 five-minute lectures by the end of 2013. Within three years this number will increase to 30,000, providing learning resources for degree and non-degree education in hundreds of subjects. Having logged into the Five-Minute Lecture Website, people are free to enjoy short teaching materials to pursue non-degree education, which can then be transformed into credits (e.g. degree education credits, vocational training credits, cultural and leisure education credits) with the help of the credit bank. The OUC will combine these five-minute lectures to create new courses that are more applicable to different education targets and models, and can thus better serve a range of individual learning needs.
By Luo Gang, http://www.china.com.cn/