Education is going through a profound transformation

Editor's note

Education is going through a profound transformation.

The schools and classroom systems formed in the industrial age are no longer suited to the information age. Not only in China, but also in many countries such as the United States, Britain and Japan, education innovation and education reform are the topics of most attention.

People are willing to pay for better and more personalized education, and advances in technology offer many possibilities for reshaping education.

Schools within the traditional system are using information technology to transform and explore traditional classrooms.

MOOC, Khan Academy, online counseling, online exams and other large and small online education projects have mushroomed, so that parents and students dazzled the field of education has become a hot land for entrepreneurship and investment.

Here, we hope to show you the most cutting-edge educational innovation cases and the most unique viewpoints, and provide valuable information content for schools, parents, education entrepreneurs and investors who are concerned about educational innovation. We are willing to become a platform for communication , And "third power" to promote educational innovation!

For the sake of education in China and for a better tomorrow, we will join hands and see you in two weeks.

This issue focuses on innovation within the online education system, is for the opening.

Reporter Ma Hui Beijing reported

"This is no longer the planet of Plato or my grandparent's age, in fact, it's your planet of learning now." American Curtis J. Bunker is open in his famous "world: How to change the education network technology "wrote.

Needless to say, web technologies are changing the form of traditional education on a global scale. At this point, you can see clearly from the educational miracle created by the Bangladeshi-born named Salman Khan.

In the wake of the tide of change, Chinese schools began to touch the net one after another, or involved in the field of online education either in depth or in depth. For a time, micro-curriculums, flip-over classes and online exercises became the "hot words" of the teachers' principals.

For a long time, China's education, especially in the elementary education stage, was regarded by the people as a stronghold of rejection of change. These schools run an increasingly efficient test machine year after year, with children miserable in them, losing their knowledge of learning.

Can online education bring a quiet revolution to Chinese education? How to deal with the tide of change in China's schools?

Learning revolution

Middle School of Tsinghua University, one of the top middle schools in China, began to test the water online education in 2014, the birthplace of the liberal arts college in Beijing.

During the semester just ended, a school high school physics teacher used the latest online education techniques in his class, playing micro-video, arranging online exercises, and trying to flip classroom teaching.

Principal Wang Dianjun said the course was "very popular with the students," and several other young teachers in the school are doing as well, but still staying on the level of using several classes of new technology. "We want teachers to have a feel for it ".

20 km away, an ordinary primary school in Shijingshan District, Beijing, a man working on a Tablet PC in English classes, the computer stored in a variety of learning materials required for the class, reading tools, test questions bank. Tablet PC has an image of the title, called "e-school bag." Beijing has set up pilot schools in several districts such as Haidian, Dongcheng, Daxing, and so on. E-schoolbags have been set up and the wireless networks have been fully covered in the pilot schools.

"The Board of Education will make every effort to promote the trial of digital resources for the development of teaching materials, complete the electronic development of the printed version of the textbooks in Beijing, and carry out the high-end electronic development of the entire textbook on the basis of this." Experts from the Beijing Academy of Education said.

The government clearly stated in a document entitled "Outline for the Long-term Education Reform and Development in Beijing" that digital primary schools will gradually establish digital campuses in the future. Digital teaching is an important part of this.

Left Beijing, 1,500 km west, four-year school in Siba Township, Liangzhou District, Wuwei, Gansu, a typical western rural school where children also have an 8-inch, custom-built tablet based on Android 4.0 .

Tablet PC equipped with a "Sunshine Classroom" learning platform for all subjects, including teaching videos, exercises, pictures and text information, students can learn independently, but also support teachers in the teaching of background editing materials on top.

This is a free-to-play device for children, provided by a charity called Sunshine House, sponsored by Yang Linfeng, a Beijing-based boy who graduated from Harvard University. He explained his original intention: "Using information technology to change China's Rural education, bringing high-quality digital resources and new teaching experiences to the neediest places. "

Whether it is "cattle school" like Tsinghua High School or the village of Siba, Gansu, the tide of information technology all influences or even changes the local educational ecology.

The more exciting picture of this change comes from the other side of the Pacific Ocean.

In September 2006, a man, a computer, and Hispanic American Salman Khan founded the Khan Academy to publish their recorded short learning clips on the video site YouTube. In 2010, Khan Academy was sponsored by the Bill Gates Charitable Foundation and Google Inc. to translate the existing teaching videos into more than ten languages, including Spanish, French, Russian and Chinese, thus becoming the global online education Leader, benefiting nearly 10 million students worldwide.

In May 2010, the open online education website Udemy was created and has 10,000 registered users of 2000 courses within 2 months; in February 2012, Udacity, an online learning community in computer science, was founded, with 90,000 in a month Students register in over 190 countries; April 2012 Coursera, edX Created and now has millions of students.

"Online education, as the third generation of distance education, has become the main force of international education reform in recent years." Shang Junjie, vice dean of Peking University's Institute of Education and director of the Department of Educational Technology, said.

Decision-makers also have consensus on this. Yuan Guiren, minister of education, made it clear that the major challenge for China's education in the future lies in how to speed up the construction of education information hardware and software and promote the modernization of education with education information.

"In the field of education, a revolution is quietly taking place," said Tang Min, a counselor to the State Council and executive vice chairman of Friends of the Foundation, in an interview with 21st Century Business Herald.

Give the option to the student

People in Beijing's 11 schools who are familiar with basic education in China know that there is an ongoing reform of the educational model centered on the "Optional Course System."

Li Xigui, principal of the reform, said: "What we are trying to do is take the curriculum reform as the core, take the elective course shift system, give students more choices and strive to break the existing education model."

However, few people know that while eleven schools in Beijing are carrying out educational reform, they also embed online education as an attempt.

The school has set up an elective course called "Classical Chinese Reading", specially equipped with computer carts, classrooms promoted during class, and students have a laptop or tablet computer.

According to the teacher who introduced this course, the difficulty of classical Chinese reading lies in the words. For the same article, the situation of students varies greatly. The teacher first set up the word question bank, the teacher machine and the tablet computer wirelessly according to the learning requirements. The students conducted "starting point monitoring" before the commencement of the course. The teacher then conducted one-on-one counseling on the mastery of individual students about the classical Chinese words.

Li Xigui views this attempt by schools as the best way to achieve "individualized education." Teachers can pay attention to the starting point of each student's learning and "teach students according to their aptitudes."

For a long time, China's basic education has been abducted on the tank of the college entrance examination. There is a widespread problem of "one school for thousands of students" and "one for thousands of students." Most schools are "what to test, what to teach and what to learn" . Despite the new round of curricular reforms implemented in 2004, it is still evident that the reforms have taken place in the framework of the traditional education model without making any substantive breakthroughs in educational philosophy, teaching contents and education channels.

On the other hand, the modern school system that originated in modern industrial society also restricted the development of personalized education.

In the current school system, students are divided into classes in accordance with the class, unified teacher, unified textbooks, unified teaching method, this standardized teaching system, to ensure that most students receive qualified education.

"Our teachers generally organize teaching according to the acceptability of mid-level students because some of them are big boys," said a high school math teacher with more than ten years of experience. "Of course, there are problems. After the students can not keep up, sometimes carrying a catch are not up.

According to Wang Dianjun, the headmaster of Tsinghua High School, people are born with different learning habits and rhythms. It is hard to take care of every student in the existing school system.

One of the greatest benefits of online education for those educators who work year-round in basic education is to offer some possibility of "individualized education" that "learns in accordance with its aptitudes." Through online education technology, students are free to choose the study time, learn the rhythm and even learn the content, the education of the selective back to the students, to stimulate their initiative.

"I think the most positive aspect of online education and overturning of classrooms is that it exercises students' autonomy and allows students to learn to choose, which in itself is part of education," said Wang Dian-jun.

A long change

Liu Chaoshao, vice chancellor at Beijing No.4 Middle School, seemed calm about the booming domestic online education in recent two years because he had seen a similar scene more than a decade ago.

It is about 2000, the rise of a wave of domestic schools launched a wave, with Liu Kaichao's words such as "springing up" in general. "At that time, after you got up every morning, check out the news on the Internet. There are probably 10 or 20 web-based schools that are set up and hundreds are estimated to have been built across the country."

Within six months, these "buds" springing up disappeared. Cyber ​​schools have closed down for various reasons, up to now, however, 101 Cyber ​​School, Beijing Fourth Middle School, Huanggang Middle School Network, People's High School Network School and a handful of others. One of the few survivors after the upsurge of that round was Liu Kaichao's Beijing Si Zhong Wang Xiao, founded in 2001 and now has developed into a well-known brand of China's distance basic education with more than 240 branches across the country.

Recalling the history of his ten years to do online school, Liu Kai-chao feel that there is a core issue has always bothered him: online school is to do education, or to do aids?

"In principle, the current online school is still in a complementary position, and its role can play an auxiliary guide for children's learning. It is far from going to force schools to carry out education reform and transport high-quality Educational resources such a level. "Liu Kai-chan frankly.

Shang Junjie, associate dean of Peking University's Institute of Education and director of the Department of Education Technology, also made a similar judgment: "Nowadays, online education in China has not touched the most important part of education, such as basic education and higher education."

While traditional schools are implementing online education, they also face practical problems such as limited funds and lack of technology.

Recently, Wang Dianjun, headmaster of Tsinghua Central High School, wanted to set up a "Mocake Alliance" to jointly produce and promote Mochu with the national high-quality high schools. The reason for joining other secondary schools is that on the one hand there is an idea of ​​making better use of the teacher resources in different schools, but on the other hand, there are also "dilution costs".

According to this reporter learned that at present the domestic online education institutions to record the cost of a muxing, and some have climbed to hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If eBooks and Flip Class are viewed as Online Education Version 1.0, researchers believe version 2.0 of Future Online Education will likely rely more on learning from learner data.

The world-renowned online education development forward-looking study "Horizon Report 2014", which have a special description.

"Based on the rise of data learning and evaluation, the use of new sources of data for personalized learning experiences and performance appraisals is attracting more and more attention." The report's compiler said.

Obviously, there are so many possibilities conceived in the field of online education that it is more appropriate to call it a "long revolution" rather than the "quiet revolution" of what it calls China's education. (Editor Xiao Xinxin Ma Juan Li Ermin)