Digitalization makes education "new" and "digital"

For Ma Peihan, a fifth-grade 8th grade student at Tongxin County No. 2 Primary School in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, he is "dealing with digitalization" every day in his learning and life.

Walking into the classroom, the teacher uses the digital blackboard and intelligent teaching assistant to push course resources and interactive games for the students, and the classroom teaching is full of fun; during self-study, the students use the tablet computer to log in to the national smart education platform, and the rich digital resources and application scenarios jump in front of them; during the lunch break, Ma Peihan calls his mother through the electronic class card and happily shares his learning experience.

In the current era of digitalization, network cables are used to bridge the digital divide and promote the high-quality and balanced development of education, screens link different classrooms to change, improve and improve the quality of education, and platforms bring together massive curriculum resources to help realize that everyone can learn, learn anywhere, and learn at any time.

Digitalization is making China's education "new" and "digital".

Compulsory courses for educational development

This year's government work report proposes to vigorously develop digital education.

Huai Jinpeng, Minister of Education, said that for a large country with a large population and unbalanced development like China, in order to achieve high-quality development of education, the development of digital education is not an elective course, but a compulsory course, which is not only meaningful, but also effective.

On January 31, the 2024 World Digital Education Conference held in Shanghai came with news: the Global Digital Education Development Index released by the Chinese Academy of Education Sciences showed that China's ranking jumped from 24th to 9th in three years.

The infrastructure is becoming more and more complete. At present, the Internet access rate of all types of schools at all levels has reached 100%, more than three-quarters of schools have achieved wireless network coverage, and 99.5% of schools have multimedia classrooms. The construction of new education infrastructure has been gradually promoted, and the construction of private education networks has been actively deployed, and the application of network technologies such as 5G and IPv6 has been promoted. All localities have accelerated the construction of intelligent interactive classrooms, virtual simulation laboratories and other teaching environments, strengthened the connection and integration of physical space and virtual space, and promoted the iterative upgrading of educational infrastructure.

High-quality resources are shared for all. In 2022, the Ministry of Education launched the implementation of the education digitalization strategy, and the national smart education platform was launched. According to statistics, the national smart education platform has connected 519,000 schools, radiating 18.8 million teachers, 293 million school students and social learners. In 2023, the National Smart Education Platform project won the UNESCO Prize for Informatization in Education. At present, the national smart education platform covers all stages of basic education, vocational education and higher education, covering all aspects of morality, intelligence, physical education, art and labor, and the supply of high-quality resources is increasing. The total number of resources on China's primary and secondary school platforms has increased to 88,000, more than 10,000 online high-quality courses on vocational education platforms, and more than 27,000 high-quality MOOCs have been launched on higher education platforms.

With the continuous advancement of large-scale application, the coverage of high-quality digital resources in China's education has increased significantly. In recent years, China has focused on narrowing regional disparities and implemented the "MOOC Western Travel Program 2.0", providing 198,000 MOOCs and customized courses, serving 540 million university students in western China. Based on the promotion of rural revitalization, the first phase of the digital teaching innovation experiment will be launched in 2023, sending more than 2,500 courses such as popular science and art to 14,000 rural primary and secondary school students. Today, volunteers from East China Normal University in Shanghai, China, can experience traditional culture, perceive the frontiers of science and technology, and exchange their inner world with primary school students in Xundian County, Yunnan Province, thousands of miles away, through the platform. Digital education is allowing more high-quality resources to break through time and space, connect urban and rural areas, and cross mountains and seas, and promote social justice through educational equity.

At the 2024 World Digital Education Conference, Huai Jinpeng said that China will carry out application demonstrations on a larger scale, select provinces, cities, counties and central and western regions with a number of conditions, promote the application of the national platform in the whole domain, all staff and the whole process, promote the establishment of pilot demonstrations, encourage all levels and types of schools to embed platform resources and services into education and teaching, enrich students' interests and hobbies with digital education resources, and make high-quality digital resources "gold" Supporting lifelong learning, launching and continuously enriching the resources of the social school, helping social learners update their knowledge and improve their technical skills in various forms, so that digital education can cover people's lives.

A new frontier in artificial intelligence

At present, AI (artificial intelligence) is empowering China's education with unprecedented depth and breadth, and digital education is becoming a new field for the development of artificial intelligence. These "black technologies", represented by intelligent teaching assistants, not only promote the transformation of teaching paradigms, but also improve the digital literacy of teachers.

Whether it is located in a remote high-altitude area or a densely populated first-tier city, the technology empowerment of artificial intelligence has had a positive impact on the development of education.

In Beijing Shijia Primary School, with the help of human-computer interaction and large-scale model technology, teachers can explain the content in the classroom across disciplines, and students can interact with the robot to ask questions at any time, and the classroom interaction and problem solving speed have been greatly improved compared with the traditional model. The primary school affiliated to Beijing Jiaotong University uses its functions of intelligent evaluation, homework management, classroom interaction management and other functions to monitor and feedback students' knowledge mastery and homework in real time.

In the morning reading class and Chinese and English classes of Zhiduo County Complete Primary School in Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province, the morning reading, model reading, recitation inspection, oral evaluation and other links are all realized by the AI teaching assistant robot, which quickly solves the problem of non-standard Mandarin and English pronunciation of teachers, and effectively improves the national common language level of teachers and students in the school.

"The empowerment of artificial intelligence has clearly improved the quality of teaching. By introducing our Elephant AI teaching assistant robot, these schools have realized multi-disciplinary integrated teaching, accurate evaluation, and recording and analysis of teaching process data in the classroom. Jin Qinghua, chairman of Beijing Zhixiang Technology Development Co., Ltd., told this newspaper, "As a scientific and technological innovation enterprise that applies AIGC (artificial intelligence generated content) and large model technology to classroom teaching in primary and secondary schools, we have developed an elephant AI teaching assistant robot, and is committed to building a heuristic interactive classroom, providing students with virtual teachers, and conducting personalized questions and answers for students' questions, including interactive activities with AI, realizing the 'dual-teacher classroom' of human-computer collaboration and increasing the interest of the classroom." ”

Intelligent interconnected blackboard, 3D experimental simulation cabin, automatic marking and analysis system...... The iterative update of advanced technology has boosted the innovation of teaching equipment and teaching methods, and also driven tens of millions of full-time teachers to continuously learn and improve their digital literacy.

In 2023, the Ministry of Education issued the industry standard "Digital Literacy for Teachers", which clarifies the connotation of teachers' digital literacy as: the awareness, ability and responsibility of appropriately using digital technology to obtain, process, use, manage and evaluate digital information and resources, discover, analyze and solve education and teaching problems, and optimize, innovate and transform education and teaching activities. How to cultivate teachers' digital literacy, what explorations and practices have been made by schools in various regions, and how to narrow the gap between urban and rural teachers in the application of information technology?

Huai Jinpeng said: "In the future, we will be committed to cultivating a large number of teachers with digital literacy, strengthening the construction of our teacher team, and integrating artificial intelligence technology into the whole process and process of education, teaching and management, so as to study its effectiveness and adaptability, so that the younger generation can learn more actively and teachers can teach more creatively." ”

New progress in "MOOC going overseas".

Digital education not only breaks down the barriers between courses, but also allows classrooms to expand indefinitely, with students from different schools and even countries taking classes in the same classroom. With the development of digital education, China's "MOOC going overseas" has made new progress.

According to the relevant person in charge of the Ministry of Education, in 2020, China took the lead in establishing the World MOOC and Online Education Alliance, with the president of Tsinghua University as the chairman of the alliance, and its members include 17 well-known universities and 6 online educational institutions in 16 countries. Relying on the World MOOC and Online Education Alliance, China MOOC has opened 341 global integrated courses, launched 10 global integrated certificate programs, and attracted nearly 25.4 million learners, cooperated with more than 30 well-known universities and online educational institutions around the world to build a two-way communication channel for course introduction and export, and organized 88 Chinese universities to provide nearly 300 high-level MOOCs for Indonesia, covering more than 3,000 universities in Indonesia. At the same time, relying on the Silk Road University Alliance, Xi'an Jiaotong University has set up 30 training topics and 743 courses in energy and chemical engineering, health care, etc.; Southwest Jiaotong University has implemented the "Belt and Road" initiative and carried out the construction of courses and teaching materials, cultivating more than 5,000 rail transit talents from more than 80 countries, radiating more than 200 universities at home and abroad, and more than 100,000 online learners, and Southern University of Science and Technology has helped 13 Asian and African countries such as Cambodia and Kenya to build smart classrooms.

At present, China's MOOC construction and application scale have become the world's first. In 2023, China held the 2023 World MOOC and Online Education Conference in Italy, which was attended by more than 180 relevant leaders, experts and scholars from more than 70 universities, online education platforms, international organizations, and government agencies from 21 countries.

The "circle of friends" is still expanding.

During the 2024 World Digital Education Conference, the World Digital Education Alliance was established, and at the same time, the international version of China's national smart education public service platform was launched. "The platform will be able to push out 780 Chinese gold courses to the world for free, providing 24-hour uninterrupted learning support for global learners. Share high-quality digital education resources with countries around the world to meet the real-time learning needs of people in different regions. Wu Yan, vice minister of education, said. (Reporter Yang Junfeng)

Source: People's Daily Overseas Edition