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China Makes Progress in Adopting New Technology in Education
China has made great progress over the past 20 years in adopting distance learning and new Information and communication technologies (NICT) to advance education throughout the country.
This was disclosed at the on-going Expert Meeting of the Fourth Ministerial Review Meeting on Education for All of the Nine High- Population Countries, which opened here Tuesday morning.
Since the 1980s, China has, via television and broadcasting schools, helped some 100 million people learn practical knowledge on agricultural production, and provided large-scale training for over two million teachers and one million headmasters of primary and secondary schools through satellite television. The teacher training has laid a solid foundation promoting China's nine-year compulsory education.
Currently, China boasts 10 education television stations at the provincial level, and more than 10,000 receiving stations for satellite signals. This has rendered the country the largest distance learning network via satellite television in the world.
Starting in 1999, China has improved its satellite television education network. On the basis of digital technologies, it built the "China Satellite Broadband Multi-Media Transmitting Platform for Modern Distance Learning," which provides support for fast and large-scale downloading of quality educational materials for primary and secondary schools, and enables school faculties without access to the Internet to surf off-line.
Besides, the Education Ministry's Pilot Project of Modern Distance Learning for Poverty Alleviation, and the Hong Kong Li Kashing Foundation Distance Learning Project for Primary and Secondary Schools of the Western Regions are being carried out jointly with a total investment of 160 million yuan. According to these projects, 10,000 receiving stations for distance learning will be established in the 12 western provinces and autonomous regions of China, and one teacher in each school will be trained for equipment use so as to help local people familiarize with information technologies.
The use of the Internet for education has also progressed in China. The Demonstration project of the China Education and Research Net, which is coordinated by the Education Ministry, has become China's second largest wired network, with a user base of over four million.
Since the end of the 1990s, campus networks have been developing very fast in China's urban and developed areas, which has provided a platform for the integration between information technology and the teaching and learning in primary and secondary schools.
At present, 1,000 experimental schools for modern educational technologies and 91 national experimental zones for IT education have been set up throughout the country. They are exploring ways to apply NICTs to education for all people.
As of the end of 2000, over 70,000 primary and secondary schools in China were offering courses in IT, reaching more than 50 million students, and more than 5,700 had established campus networks.
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