In fact, there is evidence to be found that China attaches great importance to fair and quality education. The era of relying on demographic dividend in the past 30 years has passed. Since 2011, the proportion of manual labor force in China’s population has declined significantly. Therefore, China has gradually begun to shift from demographic dividend to talent dividend. The concept of “fair and quality education” is put forward under this general premise. This policy will fulfill the dreams of more children and become the hope of more families. On this road to ensure that every child can enjoy fair and quality education, both the implementation of national policies and the holding of public welfare activities by enterprises have never stopped running.
Just recently, there was another large-scale public welfare activity. The MOOC of Chinese universities under netease Education went into the mountainous areas of Yunnan province with high-quality educational resources, providing the best educational resources in China to the children in the mountains. This is also netease’s offline activity on the same theme after it raised travel expenses for the non-profit public education support project “Beautiful China” in May this year. Netease is also planning a series of activities to bring public education to remote mountainous areas, so that more users in remote areas can learn the best university courses in China for free. Through the relay of “excellent volunteer teachers + quality online courses”, we hope to improve the current situation of lack of curriculum resources for quality education in middle and primary schools in central and western China and promote the universal benefit of education resources.
China’s education inequality is still serious, public education is imperative
According to China’s Rural Education Development Report 2016, there are nearly 127,000 small-scale schools with less than 100 students, accounting for 44.7 percent of the total number of primary schools and teaching sites, and 33,900 rural schools with less than 10 students. Shortage of students, lack of teachers, poor running conditions and low enrollment rate are the common difficulties faced by small-scale schools, which are mainly reflected in the following aspects.
Problem 1: Basic teaching resources in remote areas are still insufficient. School facilities in remote mountainous areas remain at the chalkboard stage. In recent years, with the implementation of the “Tens of billions of projects”, the problems of school buildings and other dangerous buildings have been improved and solved to a large extent. However, due to the lack of information, quality education concepts and resources are difficult to be introduced, many schools still use textbooks many years ago, and the teaching ideas are still more than ten years ago, so it is difficult to popularize quality education in these backward areas. The inadequacy of objective conditions has seriously restricted the overall development of education in rural areas.
Problem two: overall lack of teachers, subject teacher allocation is single, unable to guide students to comprehensive development. Due to the overall backward environment in remote areas, the brain drain and lack have been a big problem that has been difficult to solve for a long time. As a result, the majority of teachers in remote areas can not keep up with the treatment, the educational level is not high, and the teaching level is limited, thus aggravating the educational inequality.
Problem three: the poor cultural environment in remote areas causes students to lose in the “starting line” from the moment they enter school. The rural life is relatively closed, the penetration of modern culture progresses slowly, and the cultural quality of the parents themselves is relatively low, which has little influence on the inner culture of students.
It can be seen that public education will play an irreplaceable role in solving these problems at the juncture of China’s talent strategy transformation. On the one hand, public welfare education can speed up the development of regional education equity, improve the quality of education in backward areas, and promote the virtuous cycle of regional economic and social development after students in poor areas get quality education. At the same time, it can also improve the overall ideological and cultural quality of the region. For example, Run Run Shaw set up the Shaw Building for public education in poor mountainous areas all over the country, laying a good foundation for the development of education in backward areas and the rise of education level.
On the other hand, it is also an opportunity to help students broaden their horizons, set goals in life, build confidence and improve their academic performance, and then change their own destiny. There are some students in mountainous areas who are particularly smart. If they have good learning opportunities, their performance will be no worse than that of students with better resources, or even better. However, poverty and poor education quality deprive them of space for further development, and public education is the turning point for them to change their fate.
In order to enable more people to get the best education more equitably, netease education has been on the road of public welfare
However, public welfare education is different from other public welfare activities that are highly funded and less active. Public welfare education cannot be done well with only funds. It requires more long-term and practical planning and layout. First, education involves a wider range of areas, in addition to the backward resources in remote mountainous areas, education information at home and abroad is not equal, there are a large number of subjects and complex system; Second, education takes the longest time and has the most links. Public education needs continuous investment, from primary school to high school, from physics and chemistry to ideological, political and sports. There are more variables, longer duration and the most difficulty.
Public education is a more difficult and meaningful public welfare category. In this category, we can see not only the shaw building built by the entrepreneur Run Run Shaw of the previous generation, but also the public education layout of netease, an established Internet company. Since netease launched China’s first free open class, Netease Open Class, its pace of public education has never stopped, and it successively launched netease Cloud Class free courses and Chinese university MOOC. In July this year, netease also created a public welfare community platform, netease has been walking on the road of public education……
Ding lei’s passion for education has never changed. He has devoted himself to public education for decades because he wants to do something practical for the world, rather than to gain commercial profits from brand publicity. For example, starting from netease Open Courses and netease Youdao Dictionary, its positioning is to broaden the horizons of the broadest people and enlighten their minds. The copyright fees and translation fees are no less than ten million yuan. However, Ding Lei insists on taking nothing for ten years.
And netease’s products have always been “feelings” color, bingbing or do not always do is to do the best attitude.
First of all, we have introduced a lot of in-service engineers from Netease, Ali, Baidu, Google and other core technical mentors. Secondly, the entering institutions are strictly screened to ensure the teaching qualifications; Finally, employment-oriented students who pass the assessment can also be recommended for employment, which breaks through the barriers of study and employment.
Netease’s public education layout to this has laid a solid foundation, also had better resources to more students to promote them, hence netease public welfare and further open the situation, in May 2014, netease was opened by the Ministry of Education national fine-designed course tasks, to be a partner with higher education club “love course network” of “the Chinese university MOOC” project is launched. At this stage, netease has two goals: one is to deliver the highest quality course content to the whole society; the other is to promote the reform of higher education through technological innovation of online learning platform and realize resource sharing among universities, which further strengthens the credibility of netease’s public welfare education.
In may this year, netease education official with the China university of MOOC joint public education project “beautiful” in China, jointly launched the “together with a MOOC into the mountains, see a bigger world” as the theme of public welfare activities, to the mountains of the children sent to the quality of Internet course content, hope in the education of public netease good layout and resources under the guidance of, To realize the improvement and popularization of high quality education in rural and remote areas. Chinese University MOOC also invited MOOCs teachers to Douge Middle School in Qunei Township, Lincang city, Yunnan province, on Nov. 7 to deliver a special offline MOOCs course for students there.
Driven by netease public education, an era of shared education is coming
With the promotion of netease public education, more users in remote areas are enjoying many high-quality education resources, and some high-quality college courses and famous teacher courses can be shared by more people. Netease public education has officially opened the door of the era of shared education since then.
First, the sharing of high-quality educational curriculum resources. The resources at all levels are systematically integrated and reconstructed with the high quality education resources of each major platform to establish a large database of high quality education resources. At the same time, the establishment of a large database of education information, student data, samples are completely input into the big data system, so as to produce the most suitable for individuals or regions of education resources allocation.
Second, the sharing of high-quality teacher resources and the latest teaching software. For example, the MOOC public welfare activities of Chinese universities can deliver the best general education courses in China to remote mountainous areas by means of education + Internet, which solves the problem of unbalanced education resources and delivery of high-quality education resources.
At the same time, teachers will adopt the lightweight Internet training mode for online learning, carry out cross-regional interaction, joint teaching and research, and even make it possible to carry out self-group training for rural teachers through the Internet, so as to further optimize educational resources while sharing voluntary education.
Third, school management system, the latest educational information and other optimization of campus management sharing. In the future, school management is no longer a fixed structure, but to let different students find the appropriate path and growth mode in the unfixed management structure. The future of education is to jointly establish good educational resources, achieve more efficient and personalized management based on the sharing of school management system and education information, and help children choose appropriate courses and learning methods to achieve personalized development and growth.
For more than ten years, netease has been adhering to the original intention of “public education makes the world a better place” and striving to achieve better, fairer and better education popularization. With the concerted efforts of organizations such as netease Public Education or other education departments and social public welfare, we believe that in the near future, unfair education will gradually disappear and a shared education era is coming.
Liu Kuang, meditation on the Internet, wechat official account: Liukuang110