Abstract
China had made a remarkable headway in online education provision during the first quarter of 2020 due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) outbreak, a global public health crisis that acted as a catalyst for the uptake in online education as a method for students’ e‐learning and teachers’ e‐teaching at a vast number of institutions worldwide. China’s launching of XuetangX Global and iCourse International, two massive online open course (MOOC) platforms in April 2020 to provide distant e‐learning solutions to global learners at a time they were most needed, proves to be a timely move as the global challenge caused by this pandemic turned out to be an opportunity in disguise for online education internationally. This article centers around China’s opportune development in online education and launching university MOOCs internationally in the height of the worsening COVID‐19 pandemic in early 2020 and examines its preparedness, implementation, and impact.
Highlights
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the growth of online education had reshaped the learning environment paradigm for higher education institutions (HEIs) and learners globally
As the latest endeavor to provide high-quality undergraduate education since Chengdu Declaration, a guideline committed to foster first-rate talents with first-rate undergraduate education and jointly issued by 150 Chinese universities at the National Working Conference on Undergraduate Education at Sichuan University in Chengdu, Sichuan province, on June 21, 2018, China’s Ministry of Education (MOE) released on November 24, 2020, a list of the “initial batch of first-class national-level undergraduate courses” with a total of 5,118 entries, among which 1,875 are first-rate online courses, and as stressed by MOE, most of the latter have made a significant contribution in the unprecedented online teaching practice during the temporary closure of campuses because of COVID-19 [34]
The webinar, organized by the Smart Learning Institute of Beijing Normal University (SLIBNU) and various agencies under United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), was the third after the first one entitled “How to Keep Students Learning during Schools Disruption in COVID-19 Situation” during which Handbook on Facilitating Flexible Learning During Educational Disruption: The Chinese Experience in Maintaining Undisrupted Learning in COVID-19 Outbreak was released and the second one entitled “How to Help Children be Active Learners at Home during Educational Disruption” at which scholars, teachers, and students from severely affected countries and areas were invited to share their experiences on how to keep their students active and explore how to improve their abilities of self-learning plan and self-monitoring
Summary
Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, the growth of online education had reshaped the learning environment paradigm for higher education institutions (HEIs) and learners globally. Due to limited internet access or insufficient literacy to an array of telecommuting applications and software, to access and guide themselves through digital course offerings This has been a challenge for HEIs in China, but a way that HEIs started to facilitate learning opportunities while students were unable to attend face-to-face sessions was by using online education facilities. With China launching XuetangX Global and iCourse International, two massive online open course (MOOC) platforms, students began to have access to a wider range of courses in a digital format. Such challenges had changed the way HEIs and students experience education [1,2,3]. This article is focused on China’s seminal development in online education and launching university MOOCs internationally during a worsening impact of COVID-19 globally by examining its preparedness, implementation, and possible future impact to establish the legality of this new development and maintain the contribution it makes to global higher education
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