How Online Education in China Going on Amid Covid-19

Abstract

China had to restrict all social gatherings during the pandemic situation. As a result, the country locked down all educational institutions, offices, factories, and shops, in fact, restricted all daily activities except some emergency ones, like buying food, medicine, taking healthcare services, and a few others. The schools, colleges, and universities started online classes to continue the academic curriculum. So, students got the opportunity to attend virtual classes staying in the comfort zone of their houses. For this reason, online education technology and tutoring companies, like Dingding, Tencent Meeting, WeChat, Youdao, etc. got popular in China amid Covid-19 pandemic.

Online Education Initiatives in China

As all the campuses are closed, universities in China have taken initiatives to open 24,000 online courses, including 1,291 national excellence courses, which are competitive high-quality courses selected by the Ministry of Education, China, and 401 experimental virtual courses provided on 22 platforms. The Ministry of Education coordinated the effort and monitored the quality of the online education services offered. As an output of the initiatives universities are now conducting virtual classes and providing online courses to the students that are keeping the academic curriculum on-going in China.

Popular Online Learning Technology Platforms for Live Streaming in China

Online education is on the rise in China with the help of different enterprise communication software developed by companies in this pandemic situation. Through these platforms teachers and students can share slides, homework, exam questions, answer sheets, and get feedback. These edutech companies made online classes in China easier than ever. A few of such communication platforms got popular in China for conducting and managing virtual classrooms:

–Future School, an initiative of Alibaba Group.

–DingTalk also known as DingDing, initiated by Alibaba Group as well.

–Tencent Meeting, developed by Tencent.

-WeChat, initiated by Tencent as well.

-Com, developed by Tencent

These are live video streaming platforms used in classrooms in China for virtual classes. Most of the softwares provide free access for the users. All you need to do to get access to these individual communication tools is creating an account on the respective platforms.

Emerged Online Tutoring Companies in China

The demand for online tutoring platforms has risen up incredibly during Covid-19. Students had to stay home because of school closure, so they learned courses from online tutoring platforms. Professionals, also, stayed idle at home and they too learned professional skills through these platforms. Now they (students and professionals) are habituated to learn courses from these edutech companies and continue their learning. As a result, the edutech industry boosts up and many companies got popular:

-Yuanfudao, focussing on the K-12 courses.

-TAL Education Group, the target audience is K-12 after-school students.

–VIPKID, target audience is children between the age of 4 and 15.

–Zuoyebang, the target audience is K-12 students.

–Gogkid, target audience is children between 4 and 12 for online English Learning.

–Dedao (iGet), the target audience is K-12 and middle school students.

–Ximalaya, FM service-based online education platform targets students of all ages.

The online learning platforms are China-based individual platforms aimed to provide education to learners of different age groups. These are available on the web and mobile versions. Learners can learn from both free and paid content of the companies. These are the startups of tech giants of China, hence the contents of these companies are very much professional. 

Chinese Government’s Online Teaching Platforms for University Students

China has recently launched two global online learning platforms to accelerate distance learning amid the Covid-19 pandemic. The name of the two online learning platforms are XuetangX and iCourse International. These are the two initiatives of the Chinese government to engage students virtually. These platforms are supported by the Ministry of Education of China and the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO. These platforms avail learning resources in English and other languages for top universities around the globe. XuetangX provides more than 3,000 online courses from the world’s top-rated universities, such as UC Berkeley, MIT, Peking University, Tsinghua University, and many more. Similarly, iCourse International delivers more than 9,000 MOOCs and 1,300 online courses, 193 online English courses in the first batch as well.