BEIJING, Feb. 16 (Xinhua) -- China has been paying continuous attention to the informatization of vocational education, said Vice Education Minister Weng Tiehui, noting that all countries should deepen mutual learning and join hands in building worldwide digital connectivity of vocational education.
The remarks were made on Tuesday at a parallel session themed "Transformation and Remodeling: Digital Empowerment of the New Ecology of Vocational Education" during the World Digital Education Conference, a two-day event held from Monday in Beijing.
Participants listen to a speech at the World Digital Education Conference held in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 13, 2023. (Xinhua/Li Xin)
-- Digital transformation underway for China's vocational education
With informatization of vocational education included in the country's reform and development plan of the sector, China has established over 20 related projects including digital campuses, professional teaching resource libraries, open online courses and so on, Weng noted.
The vocational education section of the Smart Education of China platform was launched on March 28, 2022. The section integrates four service centers covering majors and course service, virtual training, teacher service and textbook resources, as well as several other themed modules.
So far, the four service centers are connected with 1,173 professional teaching resource libraries on national and provincial levels, providing 6,757 open online courses and 2,222 video classes. With over 510,000 pieces of video materials and 150,000 images and articles, an application system that is applicable to a wide range of scenarios has been established, consisting professional teaching resources of different levels .
Local education departments, as well as technical and vocational education and training (TVET) institutions in China are joining the efforts in facilitating the progress of digitalization.
Northeast China's Liaoning Province is promoting digital transformation of 100 traditional majors and developing 84 additional majors in new areas such as smart controlling. The province has also built a big data platform of vocational education to achieve digitalization of education management.
Central China's Hunan Province has introduced a new mode of vocational education community that allows interactions among students, teachers and enterprises. In order to better encourage students to learn vocational skills, the province is piloting 15 learning communities, 8 virtual simulation training sites and 1,200 sets of digital textbooks.
In 2022, Shenzhen Polytechnic (SZPT), a TVET college in south China's Guangdong Province, has been approved by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to establish a UNESCO chair on Digitalization in TVET, marking the first UNESCO chair set for vocational education in China.
Practical training in School of Communication, Shenzhen Polytechnic, China (Photo from UNESCO)
SZPT has been making extensive efforts to accurately meet the digital development needs of local industries, establishing schools of artificial intelligence (AI) and integrated circuits, as well as research platforms of smart manufacturing and the internet of things. SZPT has also been working with enterprises such as Tencent and Ping An to jointly build schools of featured industries. Striving to adjust curriculum design with program settings and promote AI transformation of courses, SZPT has developed a wide range of high-quality online courses.
The achievements in digital transformation is reshaping the new ecology of vocational education, said Chen Ziji, director of the Ministry of Education's Department of Vocational and Adult Education.
-- Constant efforts made to strengthen international cooperation
For China's TVET institutions, forms of international cooperation are no longer limited to short-term visits, exchanges or training, but extended to new territories that are going further, namely co-establishment of cooperation platforms and joint school-running, according to Zhang Kunling, assistant professor with the Belt and Road School at Beijing Normal University.
For instance, Guangxi Vocational University of Agriculture, taking advantage of its proximity to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), has led the establishment of the China-ASEAN Agricultural Vocational Education Alliance, which has attracted 38 members from five ASEAN countries. To promote agricultural modernization and international production capacity cooperation among ASEAN countries, the university also participated in the preparation of the Higher Vocational Education International Alliance for Agri-husbandry, which contains 139 members.
Under the Future of Africa – China-Africa TVET Cooperation Program, SZPT, as one of the first batch of piloting schools, is working with INP-HB, a TVET institution in Cote d'Ivoire, to train practical talents of construction engineering. In the end of this month, 24 students from Cote d'Ivoire will arrive in Shenzhen to start their one-and-a-half-year study at SZPT. After completing the whole program, qualified students will receive graduation certificates from both schools in China and in Cote d'Ivoire.
In addition, SZPT is working with three vocational institutions in Luxor, Egypt on talent training programs in the fields of hotel management, landscape technology and machinery manufacturing.
So far, SZPT has established cooperative relations with 186 institutions in 41 countries and regions, said Tang Kesheng, head of International Office at SZPT. Since 2016, the college has set up nine training centers of Chinese language and culture and vocational education in Malaysia, Bulgaria, Germany, Ukraine, Belarus, Brazil and Finland, sending out faculty members for professional training and teaching, Tang noted.
It is expected that SZPT will open more overseas innovation centers of vocational education in the future, committed to figuring out a professional certification system of vocational education that is recognized by various countries, according to Qing Zhongquan, director of SZPT's research center of technical and vocational education.
(Edited by Tong Wei, Yu Huichen with Xinhua Silk Road, yuhuichen@xinhua.org)
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