III. Seize the opportunities to fulfil our historical mission

The missions are glorious whereas the tasks are daunting. Each mission sustains the prior work and supplements the succeeding; and each is demanding and filled with great challenges. Faced with our new mission, requirements, and challenges, we must focus on seizing opportunities and overcome difficulties with all our strength in the spirit of “devotion, hard work, and selflessness.”

At present, four major opportunities must be seized to enable the transformational development of open universities.

Firstly, the fourth plenary session of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China clearly stated the importance of building an education system serving lifelong education for all. It reiterated the need to give play to the advantages of online education and artificial intelligence, to innovate methods of education and learning, to accelerate the development of a more open and flexible education system oriented to and suitable for everyone, and to build a learning society. This has empowered us to successfully run open education in an all-round way and clarified both the direction and requirements. Open universities have great development potential and space.

Secondly, the State Council has clearly proposed developing internet plus education to promote the sharing of quality resources. On 28 August 2019, the State Council convened an executive meeting and decided to promote internet plus education, to meet the educational needs of the masses, to benefit remote and poverty-stricken areas, and to promote equal access to education. This provided powerful policy support for the creation of a Chinese model of internet plus university. Notably, Sun Chunlan, a member of the Standing Committee of the 19th CPC Central Committee Political Bureau and vice premier of the State Council, inspected the OUC on 15 January 2020, which made us more determined to successfully run open universities.

Thirdly, it was clearly stated in the Medium and Long-Term National Plan to Respond Positively to Population Ageing promulgated by the Party Central Committee and the State Council that more than 20 percent of older people will have participated in regular education activities by various means by 2022. As the gap between the increasingly greater need of older people for education and the shortage of service supply products widens, education for older adults is an inexhaustible market prospect.

Fourthly, the Ministry of Education has continued to improve relevant policies and project support for continuing education and open universities. In order to put into effect the Implementation Plan for National Vocational Education Reform, the Ministry of Education has given the OUC the task of building a national credit bank for vocational education. The 2020 Work Essentials of the Ministry of Education further underlines the need to improve the quality supply capacity and service level of continuing education, and to focus on measures “to build the credit bank and to successfully run open universities,” which will lay a solid foundation for the future development of open universities.

The opportunities never come easily and they disappear quickly. Viewed from history and reality, open universities are still in an important period of strategic opportunity. Only when we unite as one to forge ahead can we seize the opportunity, strengthen areas of weakness, promote new development, and achieve leapfrog development.

In accordance with the deployment of the National Education Conference and the Leading Party Group of the Ministry of Education, we are resolved to take Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as our guide and to put into effect the guiding principles of the second, third, and fourth plenary sessions of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. We shall uphold and improve the Party’s leadership of the university’s work in every respect and make enhancing the political building our overarching principle. We shall aim to build an education system serving lifelong learning for all that can serve national strategy, industrial development, and lifelong education. We shall adhere to running education rooted in the vast land of China, persevere in the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education, and focus on implementing the “1233” project, that is, to create one team, to improve two capacities, to establish three systems, and to implement three major strategies. Within this project, the “one team” refers to a team of talented professionals with an internet-based mindset, loyalty to the Party’s educational cause, political integrity, firm implementation, and dedication and accomplishment; the “two capacities” refer to the teachers’ capacity to identify and apply global teaching resources, and the university’s capacity to manage and govern internet plus education and teaching; the “three systems” refer to the system for online security guarantee, the system for quality assessment and supervision, and the system for innovation-driven development; and the “three strategies” refer to the launch of the strategy for quality improvement of degree education, the strategy for strong social training development, and the strategy for excellent and powerful older adult university. With comprehensive policies and multiple measures, we shall strive to make open universities a major pillar of China’s lifelong education, a major platform for social education, and a major channel for a learning society so as to fulfil the new mission of open universities.

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About the author: Jing Degang, Ph.D., secretary of the Party Committee and president of the Open University of China

Reprinted from China Distance Education, written by Jing Degang