Information technology is ushering in an unprecedented new round of outbreak, the Internet, cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other modern technologies are profoundly changing the way human thinking, production, life, learning, and showing the prospects of world development, promoting the entire society to digitalization, the mainland has clearly defined the new goal of "accelerating digital development and building a digital China" in the "14th Five-Year Plan". The digitalization of education in the context of the digital economy aims to build a smarter learning environment through a new generation of information technology, change traditional teaching methods, and promote data mining, analysis and utilization in the education process, thereby accelerating the pace of high-quality development of education.
As a complex system with people as the main body, education digitalization has a more pure orientation than the digital transformation of other industries, that is, the results are ultimately reflected in teaching and education and talent development, so the whole process not only needs to promote all-round innovation and change in teaching paradigms, organizational structures, teaching processes, evaluation methods and other aspects through digital technology, but also needs to help regional and school administrators break through the difficulties of education data aggregation and circulation and governance mode reform. Therefore, the technology is applied to the improvement of teaching quality and efficiency and the improvement of students' scientific literacy, and empowers the pain points of teaching practice. Therefore, more and more schools have begun to attach importance to the educational concepts of interdisciplinarity, integration of science and education, school-enterprise cooperation and collaborative education, while paying attention to the close combination of new technologies such as AI, information and communication, electronic control, software design and traditional industrial technology, and cultivating high-quality compound talents who understand theory, strong practice and can innovate by building a talent construction system that meets the requirements of the development of the times and industrial upgrading.
Recently, Professor Zhu Qiang, Qiushi Distinguished Researcher of the School of Computer Science and Technology of Zhejiang University and Deputy Director of CCAI Human-Machine Integration Intelligence Special Committee, Cheng Maoxiang, Director of the Graphic Information Center of Yenching Institute of Technology, Sun Zhe, Product Manager of HP's Business Notebooks, Qin Li, Director of Education Industry of Intel Cloud and Industry Solution Group, and Cai Xiaopeng, Vice President of Zhongguancun Online, jointly brought an interview session with the theme of "Technological Innovation Empowers Future Education and Discusses the Practice and Thinking in the Digital Transformation of Education". Taking Zhejiang University, Yenching Institute of Technology and other schools as examples, from multiple perspectives such as smart campus construction and industry-education integration development, they discussed how Intel and HP explore new solutions through technological innovation to help the implementation of education digitalization.
At the interview meeting, Professor Zhu Qiang said that Zhejiang University has carried out many positive attempts in education digitalization, such as organizing the National University Artificial Intelligence Talent and Technology Moganshan Forum with the support of Academician Pan Yunhe, former president of Zhejiang University, and taking AI empowerment, education first, innovation leadership and industry-university collaboration as the main core; Secondly, it cooperated with domestic and foreign artificial intelligence leading enterprises, such as Intel, Baidu, and Huawei, and jointly opened courses in AI+X micro-majors; Finally, Zhejiang University has also joined hands with six universities including Fudan, Jiaotong University, China University of Science and Technology, Nanda and Tongji to jointly open artificial intelligence micro-majors to promote students in other majors to strengthen the literacy of artificial intelligence by combining artificial intelligence with other disciplines.
Director Cheng Maoxiang also said that since its establishment, Yenching Institute of Technology has always taken application-oriented talent training as its main school-running philosophy, and has made attempts in talent training, discipline development, teacher development, teacher training, etc., and actively explored and practiced the integration of artificial intelligence with art, architecture and other related majors. In addition, in 2021, Yenching Institute of Technology also cooperated with the School of Accounting, the School of Architecture and the School of Information to build a virtual simulation laboratory including a virtual simulation training area and a VR development experience area to strengthen students' cognition of artificial intelligence with practical ability.
As Director Cheng Maoxiang said, for application-oriented undergraduate and vocational colleges, the textbook itself or course PPT is not the pain point of education digitalization, the real pain point lies in how to combine theory and practice, especially for artificial intelligence teaching, only the combination of course organization management and case training in education and teaching, packaged into a platform or solution to empower the school, will help the school to put more energy into the teaching of knowledge itself. In order to quickly adapt to the talent training goals of colleges and universities and their own characteristic advantages.
And this process is the main stage for Intel and HP to unleash the power of technology.
For example, HP has cooperated with Yenching Institute of Technology on the Internet of Things Innovation Lab, which can effectively help teachers and students solve innovative activities, enhance software and hardware business capabilities, and help the school effectively complete the goal of talent training in Internet of Things engineering, communication engineering, and big data.
As a hardware manufacturer providing education digital solutions, HP in China for forty years, insight into the needs of information construction in the field of education, and strive to apply its own hardware to different scenarios of schools through the integration and innovation of hardware + applications, Sun Zhe said at the interview that in terms of AI teaching, HP provides workstations, commercial PCs and other products of different product lines, through strong local collection and data collection capabilities, as well as optimized algorithms. Enable AI inference and training at the edge.
As an upstream manufacturer, Intel starts from the platform solution side, so that HP's commercial PC and workstation products have more powerful capabilities and can play a more active role in education scenarios. This platform solution is the vPro platform born in 2006. As a platform designed for commercial computing, vPro's comprehensive and solid security, rich and flexible management, better hardware performance and higher productivity allow application-oriented undergraduate and vocational colleges to devote more energy to teaching, rather than spending manpower and material resources on IT construction, network transformation, equipment maintenance and other issues.
For example, with the steady advancement of education digitalization, the scientific research tasks undertaken by schools have higher and higher demand for terminal performance and cloud computing power, and at the same time, it is necessary to flexibly allocate various digital resources including computing power, so as to meet the tasks of teachers and students in application development, real-world training, and heterogeneous integration in different scenarios, which require higher performance and computing power to overcome problems in data collection, algorithm optimization and scenario application, and gradually improve students' learning ability and practical level. On the other hand, for schools with multiple campuses, IT administrators often face the dilemma of running back and forth, exhausted, and with the help of the vPro platform, the school's IT administrators can maintain and remotely upgrade equipment in other campuses under the condition of remote shutdown, not only that, the vPro platform can also connect wired or wireless to the firewall in the education platform, thereby greatly saving various IT equipment-related problems that may be encountered in the teaching process. This allows teachers to focus more on teaching and less on other technical aspects.
Why does the Intel vPro platform do this? Because the biggest highlight of the equipment equipped with the vPro platform is that the entire underlying platform has realized a full range of support such as CPU, network card, firmware, etc., and has realized multi-latitude improvements such as security protection, hardware upgrades, and performance improvements, specifically in terms of security, many security functions built into the chip can bring users all-round security protection out of the box and effectively reduce the attack surface; In terms of equipment upgrading, the vPro platform can ensure the reliability and stability of the equipment throughout the life cycle.
In recent years, the Ministry of Education has strengthened its overall planning, in addition to helping the digital transformation and upgrading of education through new infrastructure, it has also encouraged teachers to equip education modernization with a smarter engine through digital means and intelligent assistants. Looking at Intel's vPro platform solutions and HP's hardware products, all of them are born to reduce the contradiction between teachers' work and teaching, for teachers, when considering the deployment of IT equipment, they do not necessarily need to have too much understanding of the product itself, nor do they need to master information technology management skills, only need to deploy and activate the equipment after the procurement steps are completed, which can bring a full range of teaching experience improvement, liberation from the cage of technology, rather than becoming a slave to technology.
Of course, whether it is the digitalization of education or educational reform, the ultimate purpose is to serve the education of people, and the industry-university-research collaborative education that has attracted much attention in recent years actually points out the direction for the talent training of colleges and universities, but this process is inseparable from the joint efforts of three aspects. Taking Intel as an example, Intel is one of the earliest participants in the industry-university-research program of the Ministry of Education, and will support about 50 industry-university-research peer education programs in colleges and universities every year.
Qin Li said at the interview meeting that Intel, as a participant in the enterprise, is particularly willing to contribute its own strength to the construction of industry, education and research from the perspective of building a platform, artificial intelligence itself is a deeply integrated technology, teachers involved in the development of artificial intelligence textbooks teaching and research are actually not computer experts or information technology professionals, through vPro technology, can help teachers get rid of the shackles of technology, liberated from the cage of technology. The remote connection method, which has attracted much attention since the epidemic, has actually been widely used in the field of education, and the dual-teacher classroom and virtual simulation scenarios have been realized, so that a small ordinary traditional classroom has the ability to rejuvenate thousands of realms. As a bridge to communicate the real world and teaching classrooms, technology must have more room to play in the future, and this process must be inseparable from the in-depth communication and exploration of enterprises and universities.
Centennial plan, education first. Cultivating talents in a better way is the earnest hope of the whole society for the future of education, facing the future, lifelong learning must be an inevitable trend, for any person, not only to learn to use tools, such as the current fire of generative AI, but also to have good teamwork skills. This requires enterprises and universities to focus on talent training, provide students with a better learning platform through technological innovation, and lay a solid foundation for students' growth.
A large number of excellent technology companies such as Intel and HP have also used their deep understanding and insight into education for many years, based on the pain points and needs of the education field, to give full play to their own technological accumulation in the fields of software and hardware, accelerate the profound integration of education and technology through deep ecological power, and make human life and education itself better through science and technology, so as to meet the development trend of increasingly intelligent education and contribute more scientific and technological power to the digitalization of education.