Digitalization empowers education to become smarter
Digital technology aggregates scattered high-quality resources, breaks through the time and space limitations of traditional education, and further promotes educational equity; the emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence has helped smart education enter the fast lane of development... The power of science and technology is reshaping the future education pattern.
◎Our reporter Sun Mingyuan
2023 can be called the “year of harvest” for smart education in our country.
In September last year, my country’s “National Smart Education Platform” project won the 2022 UNESCO Education Informatization Award.
The platform covers various types of educational content for primary and secondary schools, higher education, vocational education, etc., serves tens of millions of teachers and hundreds of millions of students, and enables the sharing of more high-quality educational resources.
With the rapid development of 5G, artificial intelligence and other technologies, hybrid teaching that combines online and offline teaching and multi-party teaching and research activities are being carried out in full swing.
Internet technology and digital applications have been fully involved in education and teaching.
While smart education has achieved many results, it is also facing a new problem - where is the future development direction?
Strengthen the governance of smart education system
Wang Xiaofan, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and president of Shanghai University of Technology, has long been concerned about the two themes of education and informatization.
In his view, the connotation of smart education is not just as simple as "online classes".
"Accelerating the digital transformation of education should deeply promote changes in educational concepts, governance models, teaching methods, and ways of thinking." Wang Xiaofan said that this is not simply moving offline courses online, but changes in education models and online and offline In-depth integration of course content.
In addition to teaching, strengthening educational management, cultivating innovative talents, and promoting educational equity are all issues that need to be faced in digital transformation.
Equipment, systems, and networks are the infrastructure that supports the development of smart education, and our country has accumulated rich experience in these aspects.
However, there is still room for improvement in the system governance of smart education, and education management needs to be further strengthened.
Taking higher education as an example, in the absence of systematic governance, a university may have multiple statistical departments and business platforms, multiple statistical calibers and data interfaces, and a series of problems are prone to occur during the docking process.
Take counting the number of students as an example. Due to different methods, the statistics given by various departments are likely to be inconsistent.
In this regard, Wang Xiaofan once proposed building a unified data platform to open up data islands.
This is conducive to the sharing of educational data and resources, so that digital technology can truly be used for education.
From school administrators to teachers to students, everyone is a participant in driving the digital transformation of education.
Only by focusing on improving the digital literacy of teachers and students and cultivating the digital thinking of teachers and students can we promote the digital transformation of education and realize the cultivation of innovative talents.
Wang Xiaofan said that he has incorporated digital transformation work into the entire talent training process in the practice of information management in colleges and universities, and included digital level into the evaluation of students' comprehensive quality and teachers' teaching ability, and cultivated personality driven by artificial intelligence, big data and other technologies. Develop innovative talents and promote changes in education models.
In addition, universities in the eastern and western regions still face uneven development of informatization, and such problems also exist between universities in the same city.
In the field of basic education, there are also obvious differences in the development of educational digitalization in the eastern and western regions.
Wang Xiaofan believes that further development and popularization of digital technology is the key to solving these problems.
A more equitable and high-quality education must be supported by more balanced and adequate digital technology.
The combination of technology and talent is the key
At present, there is a phenomenon of "doing things independently" in the information construction of colleges and universities.
To solve this problem, education administration departments and university staff need to strengthen their study of educational informatization.
"School administrators, teachers, etc. play a key role in the digital transformation of education." Wang Xiaofan said that at the National Two Sessions in 2022, he proposed systematic training and assessment of university managers and the formulation of an information literacy improvement plan for university faculty and staff.
At the same time, he suggested issuing a more detailed "Guiding Suggestions Plan for Information Construction in Colleges and Universities" and exploring the pilot establishment of full-time chief information officers in colleges and universities.
“In the past two years, the work mentioned in the proposal has made good progress.” Wang Xiaofan told reporters.
For teachers, training is not just "online classes", but should follow the practical logic of teachers' professional development, meet teachers' real teaching needs in specific educational situations, and match online and offline learning resources to teachers in a timely and accurate manner.
Pang Lijuan, deputy to the National People's Congress, vice chairman of the Central Committee for Democracy, and professor at Beijing Normal University, pointed out that the development of smart education has put forward new requirements for the digital transformation of teachers, and improving the digital capabilities of teachers should be combined with specific educational scenarios.
Pang Lijuan suggested that a new generation of intelligent teacher training platform should be built, the lecture-based video training for teachers should be upgraded to practical improvement training, and scenario-based training embedded in the actual education and teaching work process should be carried out.
Teachers need to practice and improve in real education and teaching practice.
This requires a new generation of intelligent teacher training platforms that focus on core businesses such as teacher learning and lesson preparation, and set up functions such as intelligent comprehensive collection of multi-modal data, accurate diagnosis and analysis of educational and teaching abilities, and intelligent recommendation of personalized learning resources.
Artificial intelligence drives education changes
"The development of artificial intelligence technology provides good opportunities and technical support to reshape higher education and promote changes in learning methods, teaching models and research paradigms." Wang Xiaofan said.
At this year’s National Two Sessions, the Central Committee of the China Association for the Promotion of Democracy put forward the “Proposal on Actively Promoting the Transformation of Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Education.”
The proposal mentioned that promoting the integration of intelligent technology and education and teaching will help promote the transformation of teaching models into digital and intelligent directions.
In response to some problems that have arisen in the application of artificial intelligence in education, the proposal puts forward suggestions around the two keywords of "scenario" and "talent team": encourage more research and development of key technologies, enrich the application scenarios of artificial intelligence in education, and guide Research and development focuses on the reconstruction of the education system and the innovation of teaching models; at the same time, it is necessary to improve the ability of teachers to use artificial intelligence to innovate teaching methods, and to allow teachers to remain critical and selective in the application of artificial intelligence in education.
In recent years, my country has regarded artificial intelligence as a strategic emerging industry and attached great importance to ethical issues in it. It has issued the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Governance Principles - Developing Responsible Artificial Intelligence" and the "New Generation Artificial Intelligence Ethical Code". document.
The above proposals also recommend standardizing the application of artificial intelligence, strengthening the construction of risk monitoring mechanisms, and accelerating the improvement of laws and regulations related to generative artificial intelligence.
"On the basis of adhering to the bottom line and advocating rational use, we should actively and steadily promote artificial intelligence technology to empower higher education, and improve the digital literacy of our country's university administrators and teachers through learning and training. On the basis of effectively preventing risks, we should explore Artificial intelligence technology promotes the transformation of higher education." Wang Xiaofan said.