China's Formal Online Education under COVID-19

Actions from Government, Schools, Enterprises, and Families

Zehui Zhan, Liming Huo, Xiao Yao, Baichang Zhong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000452341
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Computer Science

This book investigates how schools, enterprises and families in China have coped with the formal online education in the light of government policy throughout the COVID-19 epidemic outbreak, with special focus on the problems they have encountered and possible solutions.

Using grounded theory, over 1000 posts retrieved from public online forums were analyzed under a 4*4 framework, referring to four special time nodes (proposal period, exploratory period, full deployed period, exiting period) and four major subjects (government, schools, enterprises, families). The book identifies four main issues faced by massive online education during the epidemic: platform selection in proposal period, teacher training in exploratory period, resource integration in full deployed period, and flexibility of returning to schools in exiting period. These findings enlighten us with a deeper understanding of the process of online learning in an educational emergency, helping to develop best countermeasures in similar situations, as well as to provide paths to follow for other countries.

The book will appeal to teachers, researchers and school administrators of the online education and education emergency management, as well as those who are interested in Chinese education during the COVID-19 outbreak in general.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003188261-1

The deadly COVID-19 pandemic has had a great impact in education sectors around the world. According to UNESCO, 130 countries have closed schools nationwide, keeping more than 776.7 million children and youth out of schools. As of late April 2020, 1.2 billion (73.8% worldwide) students and youth across the planet have been affected by school and university closures due to the COVID-19 outbreak. Global school closures in response to COVID-19 have exacerbated an already worrisome learning crisis – some 325 million children in many countries across East Asia and the Pacific have now missed more than two months of school. China is the first nation to take action to promote flexible education during the pandemic. Since January 23, 2020, the government of China (GOC) has banned most face-to-face activities, including in-school teaching. In addition, the Chinese Ministry of Education has launched an initiative entitled “Disrupted Classes, Undisrupted Learning” to provide flexible online learning to over 270 million students from their homes. Consequently, government policies have shifted K-12 mainstream education from offline schooling to formal online learning. Many schools have ramped up online classes, to keep students’ learning on schedule. Hundreds of millions of adolescents in China have been receiving online education as the only approach to formal learning for four to eight hours a day.

Most governments around the world have temporarily closed educational institutions, in an attempt to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. These nationwide closures are impacting more than 89% of the world’s student population. Several other countries have implemented localized closures impacting millions of additional learners.

To meet the new demand, many solutions have been proposed, such as online flipped classrooms, live broadcasts with interaction, teacher-oriented teaching online with parental assistance offline, multi-platform blended learning, etc. More important, these various forms of online teaching tremendously changed traditional teaching and learning forms. After the proposal period, teachers and students gradually adapted to online learning. It was reasonable to deduce that after the outbreak, when returning to campus, more teachers and students would continue to use the online approach, because the whole process has accumulated rich experience and quality resources for formal education. In addition, another important and far-reaching influence was the engagement of enterprises related to online education. This closed the gap between schools and enterprise, and shaped a new school-enterprise cooperation form, providing good external conditions to move from informal online learning outside of school to formal online learning inside of school. In brief, COVID-19 has blurred the boundary between formal and informal learning, remodeled the relationships between students, teachers, and schools, and stimulated a significant revolution of educational modality in human history.

We believe that online educational issues under the current outbreak of COVID-19 in China should be specifically addressed. More and more countries and regions will face similar problems, and the experiences from China could be available to them.

To this end, we analyze online education policies and discussions from various parts of society. As we all know, the flexible online learning policy under COVID-19 has aroused a strong response from the public, and policy promotion was actually a dynamic process. Teachers and students are directly involved, and schools, enterprises, and families also respond timely to the policy and interact closely as stakeholders. During the whole period, there have been tremendous public online discussions on online forums, Twitter, blogs, in newspapers, etc., which provide representative samples for discourse analysis.

Therefore, this book tries to figure out: How have schools, enterprises, teachers, and families taken action under government policies in different periods during the COVID-19 pandemic? What kinds of problems have they encountered, and what suggestions have they proposed?

Global disasters have brought huge economic losses and casualties to countries and regions around the world (Ritchie & Roser, 2020; WMO, 2013), and their impact on various countries has shown an upward trend (Cao, 2014; Wu, Fu, Zhang, & Li, 2014). This makes disaster risk management in various countries more complicated (O’Brien, O’Keefe, Rose, & Wisner, 2006), especially in poor regions and countries, which may cause even greater imbalances and inequality in development (Wisner & Walker, 2005) and will inevitably have a great impact on the education system, since educational opportunities are usually greatly restricted during a crisis (Wang, 2014). For example, vulnerable groups that have newly expanded due to the outbreak of the crisis may find it difficult to continue to obtain educational opportunities; schoolteachers and students may face physical safety or psychosocial risks on their way back to school or when they live at school. In view of the impact of severe disasters, building a national emergency response mechanism for the education system and the interaction of various subjects in the education emergency system have become urgent problems. Therefore, this book argues that in the face of a sudden crisis, various educational emergency measures under the leadership of the national government will help teachers and students affected by the crisis to deal calmly with their situation, and reduce the impact of the crisis on the rights of teachers and students. These measures would provide opportunities of carrying out online courses and guarantee the normal operation of the education system, and traditional education could even be changed, to produce a new mainstream form of education. For example, during the pandemic, GOC took the lead in issuing the “Postponed Start of School” and “Disrupted Classes, Undisrupted Learning” policy. Schools at all levels and various types have successively shifted to online education under the guidance of the policy, which provides opportunities for the rapid development of online education on a large scale. According to the statistics, as of March 17, 2020, there are as many as 440,000 pieces of information related to online education discussions, which has become a hot spot of public opinion (People’s Network 2020a). Before February 5, 2020, for jointly implementing and guaranteeing online teaching in colleges and universities during the pandemic prevention and control period and to realize “stopping classes without stopping teaching and class without stopping school”, the Ministry of Education issued instrument of “Guiding Opinions on Doing a Good Job in the Organization and Management of Online Teaching in General Institutions of Higher Education during the Period of Pandemic Prevention and Control”, which required the government to take the lead based on universities, and the society to participate in the national online teaching activities. Since February 2, the Ministry of Education has organized 22 online course platforms to open more than 24,000 online courses for free, covering 18 disciplines in more than 12 undergraduate colleges and vocational colleges. On April 10, 2020, a video conference on the construction of an international platform for online teaching in Chinese universities, hosted by the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education, was held in Beijing. According to data from the conference, as of April 3, there were 1,454 regular colleges and universities nationwide online, and more than 950,000 teachers opened 942,000 and 7.133 million online courses, and 1.18 billion students participated in online courses (Chen, 2020). As the whole country began to respond to the call of the Ministry of Education for “Disrupted Class, Undisrupted Learning”, primary and secondary schools as well as universities across the country were actively using various online platforms where enterprises provided free usage, which provided effective help for them to carry out online education. According to the requirements of the Ministry of Education, education department authorities at all levels, educational organizations, and enterprises should provide online learning resources and support services for teachers and students to ensure “Disrupted Class, Undisrupted Learning”. After the outbreak of the pandemic, Chinese education enterprises provided a large number of high-quality online course resources and learning support services for free, and even added additional courses and services, such as family education and mental health education. While responding to the call of the country, this also helped their own development and won praise from many.

In this situation, online teaching does not simply mean putting instructional activities on a network platform. but rather doing a good job in the transformation of instructional methods and adopting distance education methods to carry out online education during the pandemic period, thus solving the problem of “at home” students. The state of “delayed learning” requires consideration of the transformation of the instructional organization structure, fluency of the instructional structure, diversity of the learning structure, and flexibility of the learning structure (Zhu & Peng, 2020). Accurate and flexible online and offline connection to teachers and students is the key to improving the ability of the education system to respond to disasters in the information era. This mainly starts from five aspects, which include: build a learner-oriented online curriculum system, consummate a quality-oriented online curriculum evaluation system, create a problem-oriented human-computer interaction curriculum ecology, choose the “whole body response” course implementation method, and construct a multi-subject collaborative education course environment, to attain a precise connection between online education and offline education (Liu, 2020a). During the pandemic, Chinese online education must first focus on optimizing a school’s online education network environment and hardware equipment, to provide students with a personalized and diversified online education environment. This is the most difficult hardware problem in the transition from offline education to online education; Second, this is inseparable from the integration of high-quality online educational resources and management platforms, to ensure that online education resources and platforms are systematic, appropriate, and standardized (Fu, & Zhou, 2020). In short, the success of online education is closely related to the abundance of online education resources and platforms.

In addition, there were other foreseeable difficulties and challenges. Liu (2020c) argues that the most challenging thing is how to ensure that the quality of online classroom teaching is substantially equivalent to that of classroom teaching offline, where students and teachers do not have face-to-face communication. Zhu (2020) summarizes the possible problems: how to build a learning structure that suits local conditions; how to carry out learning at home; what to learn at home, and how to avoid excessively increasing the burden on students, parents, and teachers; what is the positioning of “Disrupted Class, Undisrupted Learning”, and how to make connections after school starts. Additional issues include: how students learn effectively; how teachers carry out teaching; how the education department manages scientifically (Xu et al., 2020); how to ensure the efficiency of online learning at home for students, etc. Those are new tasks to be faced for every teacher (Zhou, 2020b). As online learning becomes the most important way of learning, various educational institutions must also develop teaching in new ways to solve various new professional, technical and management problems. If we can’t solve these problems, it will greatly affect the quality of online education.

Online education under the pandemic has the potential for universality, inclusiveness, and participation, showing great advantages (Zhang, 2020b): (1) Not restricted by physical space, students can participate in learning at home, reducing the risk of spreading the pandemic; (2) Courses can be watched repeatedly, which provides allows students to review, summarize, and take notes; (3) High-quality teaching resources can be disseminated and sharied,in areas with lower education levels.. Therefore, online education can extend educational content and has excellent development prospects (Yang, 2020). But there are also many shortcomings: the number of online courses is huge, while the quality is uneven; students are required to have greater learning autonomy and self-discipline; more important, the lack of communication and interaction between teachers and students was not conducive to mobilizing students’ enthusiasm for learning (Zhang, 2020a). To address these problems, online instruction can be optimized from different aspects, such as improving hardware facilities and software resources to provide a good environment for online teaching; changing the teaching concept from “teaching for teaching” to “teaching by learning”; innovating teacher training and research methods to improve teachers’ online teaching design ability; and, using learning analysis technology to achieve data-driven teaching in accordance with their aptitude (Wang et al., 2020).

The call “Disrupted Class, Undisrupted Learning” proposed by the GOC was a major strategic opportunity to promote teaching reforms and carry out educational innovation. It was an important social practice for the development of all-staff education and comprehensive education, an important opportunity to improve education governance, and boosted the technological revolution (Liu, 2020b).

The scale, scope, and depth of online education at this time is an unprecedented initiative in the history of higher education in the world and the first such experiment on a global scale. It has not only successfully responded to the crisis of the suspension of schools, teaching, and classes brought about by the pandemic, but has also created a new peak of online teaching, explored new practices for online teaching, and formed a new paradigm for online teaching, with far-reaching significance for the future reform and development of higher education in China and around the world.

As more and more nations began to face the educational emergency from pandemics (e.g., avian flu or H1N1) or natural disasters (e.g., the Christchurch earthquakes), the availability of open online education is of critical importance (Tonk et al., 2013). Online learning could potentially continue education during school closures after disasters, offering students substantial benefits and learning opportunities, including the convenience of time and place. School administrators in earthquake-prone regions are called upon to develop emergency plans to deliver online learning, to mitigate the disruption of education delivery and the impacts on students and schools after disasters (Baytiyeh, 2018). In order to help students master the basic disaster management content, the government of Toronto, Canada, called on schools to develop, implement, and evaluate an online disaster management professional course from 2007 to 2008, including videos, forums, online table games, and virtual disaster simulations, which professionals participated in together (Atack et al., 2009). Promoting social cohesion through the improvement of the capabilities of school administrators with regard to shifting to an online teaching and learning mode during school dysfunctions or closures is key to the post-earthquake recovery of vulnerable communities in divided societies (Baytiyeh, 2019). One university in Taiwan has established an “earthquake school”. Teachers educate students about earthquakes, and students also learn about earthquakes in an interesting environment (Liang et al., 2016).

In the United Kingdom, the Department of Higher Education and other departments have actively coordinated various colleges and universities to respond to the pandemic and suggested that all colleges and universities make corresponding educational model adjustments, in accordance with the government’s prevention and control policy guidelines. With the spread of the pandemic in the UK, and a shortage of medical resources, teachers and students in British universities have begun to live at home. Many universities have started online teaching and examinations since March 16, 2020, and some have fully implemented online education, such as Imperial College London, the London School of Economics, King’s College London, University College London, Durham University, Lanka University of Edinburgh, the University of Edinburgh, etc. (Zhao, 2020). The data shows that Zoom video conferencing software had 10 million active users at the end of 2020, and this number soared to more than 200 million in March 2020 (Yu, & Gui, 2020). In France, since March 16, most colleges and universities have stopped offline teaching and gradually begun online teaching, including École Polytechnique Paris, Grenoble École de Management, HEC Paris, the European School of Knowledge Economy and Management, the European Business School, etc. (Zhao, 2020).

In current studies of “educational emergency” and “emergency education”, researchers are concerned with how to strengthen the government’s handling of disasters and how to implement emergency education, to help students reduce the risk of disasters. Namely, integrating how to reduce the risk of disasters, and how to quickly return to normal life into the curriculum into contents. In contrast, fewer researchers pay attention to how multiple subjects in the education system should play their roles, how to take measures to reduce the impact of sudden disasters on the current development of the education system, and how the various subjects interact and play a role. From the existing literature, more will be combined with health education, or hygiene health education, etc. At the same time, online education is advocated as an emergency measure, to protect students’ right to education and reduce the impact on teachers and students.

2 Theoretical basis

DOI: 10.4324/9781003188261-2

The sudden occurrence of disasters is likely to cause education systems to break down, then fail to operate normally. It is difficult to solve all problems if we rely on government alone. Therefore, it is necessary to seek new solutions and solutions from multiple subjects (Chen & Peng, 2020; Peng, 2020). The theory of welfare pluralism was proposed by scholars as an alternative to the welfare state after the crisis of the 1970s; it is also called a mixed economy of welfare. The theory emphasizes that the government is not the only provider of welfare, nor is the market, but rather the government, the market, and all parts of society jointly provide a diverse combination of welfare paradigms (Lin, 2002; Peng & Huang, 2006). According to the development process of welfare pluralism theory, there are two main schools of thought about the division of welfare providers: one is the triangle method, represented by Ross and others (Peng, 2015; Wang, 2010); the oth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical basis
• 3 Research methods
• 4 The first stage: Proposal period
• 5 The second stage: Exploratory period
• 6 The third stage: Fully deployed period
• 7 The fourth stage: Exit period
• 8 Discussion
• 9 Implications
• Appendix
• References
• Index