Tencent Education Wang Tao: Digital base, digital integration, innovative application to provide technical power for education

On November 3, the Tencent Digital Ecology Conference On Smart Education was held in Wuhan. Wang Tao, Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Vice President of Tencent Education, attended the conference and delivered a keynote speech on the "people-oriented" education of science and technology. In his speech, he shared his new thoughts on the development of education informatization and how Tencent Education can provide assistance for education development under the background of new infrastructure.

Wang Tao, Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Vice President of Tencent Education

In July this year, the Ministry of Education and six other departments issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Construction of New Education Infrastructure and Building a High-quality Education Support System", which clearly defines the new infrastructure system of education that is led by the new development concept, led by informatization, and oriented to the needs of high-quality development of education, focusing on new infrastructure systems such as information networks, platform systems, digital resources, smart campuses, innovative applications, and trusted security.

Wang Tao said that the new infrastructure of education can be understood as three levels: the first layer is a new network, a new platform, and a new security, the second layer is a new resource and a new campus, and the third layer is a new application. Based on the needs of these three layers, Tencent Education has built three levels of services: digital docking, digital integration and innovative application.

Among them, the first layer of digital base services helps the education industry build an "information highway" with the ability of "cloud-network integration" and provides green, safe, unified and open education digital base services; the second layer of digital integration services, through technical capabilities to integrate online and offline learning spaces, create smart campus spaces, and promote the realization of digital resources to support the mode of teaching, online teaching and research, and online teaching; the third layer provides innovative application services and deeply integrates the "teaching", "learning", "management", "evaluation" and "research" of education and teaching work. 3. "Training" six links, with AI as the highlight to create an intelligent application service complex, to help achieve teaching mode innovation.

"Tencent's values of education are people-oriented, technology for good, education is a black box, but technology can make it more transparent little by little." We hope to be able to help managers make scientific decisions through tools, help teachers teach according to their aptitudes, help students develop in an all-round way, and use technology to provide more temperature and more power to education. Wang Tao said.

The following is the full text of Wang Tao's speech:

Distinguished leaders, distinguished guests, colleagues in the field of education, hello! I am Wang Tao of Tencent Education. I feel very cordial when I return to Wuhan today, because I am also from Hubei, so I am also very excited that this ecological conference will be held in Wuhan. Just now Meng Ju and Qiu Zong have made wonderful sharing, and I will share some of the thoughts and practices of Tencent and Tencent Education in the post-epidemic era, especially in the context of new education infrastructure.

Earlier, Mr. Qiu mentioned the in-depth cooperation between Tencent and Wuhan, and the cooperation between the two sides is indeed very much, including in the field of education. I was very impressed that on the night of the twenty-eighth day of the Chinese New Year in 2020, we received news that the epidemic (in Wuhan) was serious and that it might not be possible to start school normally, and asked if we had some solutions. That night, we began to hold a meeting, and at about two o'clock in the morning, we decided to set up a "suspension of classes and non-stop learning" team, which should be the earliest anti-epidemic team established by Tencent. Of course, in the end, we also lived up to the trust, and we well supported the first line of classes for students in Wuhan.

From the entire epidemic period to the follow-up, Online Teaching in Wuhan has achieved very good results. In addition to cooperation with the Wuhan Municipal Education Bureau, we also cooperate with many district education bureaus, as well as Universities such as Wuhan University and Huake University, such as the guided tour system of Wuhan University Cherry Blossom Viewing, etc., here we also thank Wuhan City for its support and recognition of Tencent, and also express our most sincere respect for the contributions made by Wuhan citizens during the epidemic!

This year is the opening year of the "Fourteenth Five-Year Plan", China's economy has achieved rapid development, of which education has played a great role and cultivated a large number of talents for economic development. So, how will future-oriented education develop? The State has shown us the way. Let's first look at foreign countries, information technology is promoting the transformation of education and teaching models, from mooc to virtual laboratories to a variety of teaching innovations, the world is implementing the distance learning model.

Back in China, education informatization has achieved very good results in recent years, and has achieved 95% of the coverage of multimedia teaching, and the school-school and class-to-class communications have been built very well. Looking forward to the future, if China wants to become a comprehensive and modern country, education will continue to play a basic and leading role.

These years have been a critical period for education informatization, and the state has also introduced a series of policies to promote the development of education into a new stage. As a digital tool and assistant, how should Tencent play a role in the wave of new education infrastructure? Here are some of our thoughts.

The new infrastructure of education can be divided into three levels: the first layer is new networks, new platforms, and new security; the second layer is new resources and new campuses; and the third layer is new applications. Based on these three layers of needs, Tencent Education has built three layers of services for digital docking, digital integration and innovative application.

The idea of the first layer of digital base services, Tencent Education is to link provincial, municipal, district, school multi-level institutions, by the government to set standards, the government to build a platform, enterprises to do products and maintenance, by the school to purchase services, the formation of such a model and system, and ultimately to help build the education ecology within the system.

As an example, there is a low-code development platform on this basis, so that people with no development experience can quickly build applications, build applications and services. In the Affiliated Primary School of Hefei Normal University, a group of teachers with no development experience, under the leadership of the principal, spent more than a month to develop more than 50 applications, including teacher-student dining, logistics, management, and teaching affairs, which were used very well in the school. Such a model can make the school's educational ecology or regional education ecology more prosperous and better. We also use this model in Shenzhen Luohu, Shanghai and many parts of Yunnan.

The second layer of services is digital convergence. Digital convergence corresponds to new campuses and new resources. Let's first look at universities, the benchmark of university informatization is Shanghai Jiaotong University, we have delivered the largest cloud computing platform in the field of universities for Shanghai Jiaotong University, which is applied to teaching, scientific research and management, and can serve the scientific research tasks of multiple disciplines. During the epidemic, virtual laboratories have been set up based on this platform, such as computational materials science and other disciplines, to do simulation, simulation and calculation in the virtual laboratory in the cloud. Compared with the traditional offline laboratory, the effect is better during the epidemic, and through some cloning functions, the laboratory environment can be quickly cloned, and the degree of standardization is also very high. At present, jiaotong university has dozens of courses that adopt the cloud model, so that the physical space and digital space of teaching, as well as offline and online resources, can be integrated and unified.

In addition to realizing the integration and unification of resources, digital integration is also promoting the reform of some education and teaching models. For example, in the case of Daliangshan, changing the mode of classroom teaching through a piece of A4 paper was achieved through Tencent's teacher assistant. It is not only a resource platform, but also a platform for teachers to design courses, and a platform for students to learn independently.

This is our understanding of digital resources, and we believe that digital resources are not simply digital resources, they are an interactive, interactive, and closely related matter to learning. We were a little worried when we started using Daliangshan, because there were a lot of left-behind children in Daliangshan, who had done similar things in the past, but the effect was not very good, and later we found that they were using our products on a regular basis, and we went back to visit the feedback from teachers and students. Several students reported that they used to be shy, always bowed their heads during class, and were reluctant to participate, but through such techniques and models, they could learn very easily, and their motivation to learn was much higher. So we are also thinking that maybe digital resources can play a big role in the educational balance in the future.

In terms of teaching innovation, we have cooperated with Longhua District to build Longhua Cloud School based on the ability of teacher assistants, through the ar learning mode, students can carry out inquiry-based learning in the park, such as the Insect Museum, that is, the offline Insect Hall is moved online through ar, so that more students can achieve the combination of cloud learning and practice, so as to better cultivate students' comprehensive literacy.

After talking about basic education, we look at the talent training of colleges and universities, how can digital resources support the talent training direction of colleges and universities? This is Tencent's industrial Internet academy. Our core concept is to start with the end, we take the needs of enterprises backwards, analyze what kind of talents and digital models are needed now, and then use some scenarios and data to provide relevant courses, and form a sustainable system to help universities cultivate talents that are closer to the market. At present, we have cooperated with hundreds of universities.

The third layer is innovative services. When it comes to innovative services, we have to mention AI, we imagine that the role in education, in the past there were teachers, students, parents, etc., if there are teacher assistants, student assistants in the future, then these roles have changed, our classroom methods, curriculum content will also have some interesting changes, this is worth exploring the direction. Therefore, on the basis of cloud, AI and other capabilities, Tencent Education has innovated some applications and scenarios with ecological partners to jointly promote the upgrading of education digitalization.

To give a few examples of scenarios, the first is AI+ sports, what kind of chemical reaction can AI + sports produce? In the past, the school physical education class had a requirement of one hour outside the classroom, but for the teacher, it is difficult to grasp the situation outside the classroom, but through our platform, students return home, do sports through mobile phone mini programs, data can be real-time to the teacher, physical education teachers can grasp the situation of students, but also can hold a lot of online activities and events.

In the gorgeous primary school in Shenzhen, we let the students' sports enthusiasm be unprecedentedly high in this way, and after returning from the holiday, we can see that the students' sports performance has improved significantly, in the words of the teacher, "the physical education teacher has finally raised his eyebrows", and they have used information technology to achieve the "counterattack" of information education. In addition, our schools in Changsha and other parts of the country are also covered.

And AI+ education itself. Based on Tencent's self-developed engine, we launched a learning program for adolescent artificial intelligence, and there is a small product manager course in Tianjin Heping Second Primary School. This lesson is not to teach students how to learn technology, but to encourage children to use technology to solve problems in their lives, so that children can learn to use the power of science and technology to solve problems in life, plant a seed for them, and use technology to change the world in the future, which is why we attach great importance to the artificial intelligence education of teenagers.

I have always believed that the future is an era of human-machine coexistence, so that young people can master the thinking and ability of AI from an early age, which can help them better adapt to society, lead society, and promote the development of the country in the future. Of course, I also call for more schools and more places to open relevant courses as soon as possible. In addition, there are some other AI-related teaching services, and I will not expand the time relationship.

The above is our three-tier service system of digital docking, digital convergence and innovative applications. Tencent Education's positioning is to be a digital tool and assistant, and we hope to be able to help managers make scientific decisions through tools, help teachers teach according to their aptitudes, and help students develop in an all-round way.

With the support of education authorities at all levels and schools, Tencent Education has achieved good development results in recent years, and we have now served more than 1,000 provincial, municipal and county education authorities and more than 100,000 schools, serving 450 million users and more than 300,000 institutions. Tencent's values of education are people-oriented and technology for good. Education is a black box, but technology can make it more transparent little by little, and provide more temperature and more power to our education through technology.

Finally, Tencent Education is also an open system, we know that the strength of Tencent Education alone is far from enough, we hope to work with all colleagues in the education industry to help the development of education. We also hope to work with education authorities at all levels, schools and teachers to make due contributions to information education, and to our children and the future of our motherland. Thank you!