 Dear President Shengwu, Xie, Dear Dr. Fun-Den Wang, Dear Presidents and Experts, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Good Morning!
Today I am very happy to have been invited to attend the Second MIT OCW Forum. First, on behalf of the Ministry of Education of China, I would like to express my warmest congratulations on the opening of the Forum and would like to extend my sincere greetings to the experts, scholars from abroad and home, and especially to the presented Presidents today who are very busy at the beginning of the new semester. I also give thanks to those American experts, scholars, old and new friends who have been caring and supporting higher education in China. Thank you so much for the great work you have done for the communication and cooperation of higher education between American universities and Chinese universities and I warmly welcome you to China!
The rapid development of modern information technology and its wide application in the educational field not only caused educational concepts, modes, content, methods and means to be changed greatly, it also provided the possibility for universities to maximally share their quality teaching resources with society. This educational informationization is bringing about a revolution in education and this is highly paid attention to by more and more countries. The Chinese government is also paying great attention to the construction of educational informationization. We all know that the State Council/Department already approved the start-up plan of educational informationization from 2003 to 2007, as proposed by the Ministry of Education. The plan clearly pointed out how to implement the construction project of educational informationization, how to speed up the construction of infrastructure and resources for educational informationization, how to foster peoples'abilities, and how to enhance the application level of modern information technology in the educational system. In recent years, the Ministry of Education actively boosted educational informationization. It strengthened the construction of infrastructure and campus Internet among colleges. At the same time, it also paid great attention to enhancing the construction, sharing, and application of quality network teaching materials among colleges and universities, and allowed some universities to set up network education (virtual) universities to be the experimental units of modern network teaching.
Universities, especially those experimental universities, also actively advanced the construction of the digital campus and quality network teaching resources. They will enhance the reformation and innovation of teaching and research by the main means of information and digital communication technology, such as computer networks and multi-media usage.
The construction and sharing of quality network teaching resources are the key concept in the construction of informationization among universities. In 2000, the Ministry of Education invested 30,000,000 for the construction of 300 basic and experimental network courses for colleges and universities, case examinations, and examination storage/data bases.
In order to enhance the construction and sharing of quality teaching resources among universities and the quality of teaching and people, the Ministry of Education proposed that in the following five years, 1500 national quality courses will be set up. All of the content related to the courses will be put on the Internet and be freely accessible by users through modern information technology. Then different categories and three levels of quality courses--the school level, province level and national level--will gradually be formed. Since 2003, 151 courses have been evaluated as national level quality courses.
Universities have started to pay attention to the construction and sharing of quality teaching courseware. Some universities actively encourage teachers to put their teaching materials on the Internet and to explore the teaching mode of combining distance education with traditional face-to-face education in order to enhance the exploration and application of network resources. Few universities have made some of their couresware freely accessible to the whole of society. According to the statistics, since 2003, the 68 experimental distance education universities have launched around 10,000 couresware.
That which the Ministry of Education of China has called on has a lot of similarities with the project that CORE and MIT are doing. I hope we could learn from each other. MIT first put forward the plan to place the related materials of 1,000 courses gradually on the Internet and to make these freely accessible. This plan is very meaningful to the opening and sharing of quality educational resources among universities, especially among famous universities. The Ministry of Education also encourages universities to learn from the other top universities in the world, to introduce first-class educational resources to China and to start a smooth  cooperation and communication with MIT according to their own realities. In order to enlarge the application of MIT OCW, 12 universities from China have formed a special organization--CORE (China Open Resource for Education). These 12 universities have a great heart for this project. Here I want to specifically introduce the Former President of Beihang, Professor Shen Shituan. When I just came to work in Ministry of Education, he introduced the cooperation with MIT. I also know that several universities are working very hard in supporting this project--for example, Beijing Jiaotong University. Dr. Fun-Den Wang also came back and forth to China several times in order to introduce this project. The Higher Education Department has done some investigation into this project. Certainly what we have known is not enough yet; thus, on behalf of the Ministry of Education, we should more warmly support and promote this cooperation. I, myself, also hope that more and more universities will set up a good cooperation with experts and professors in related areas and will initiate further communication and cooperation while they utilize MIT OCW on their own campus. The Ministry of Education also hopes that it can make its efforts in its process of exploring this project openly shared, especially the successful experience of resource construction and teaching reformation among universities. It hopes to hold regular forums to discuss the key issues that appeared in the process of resource construction and sharing. I believe this is a very good and necessary format. I just came back from Yale University, where we have a program called Advanced Universities Leadership Program. I also visited MIT briefly at this time. The main purpose is to enhance cooperation between Chinese universities and MIT through comparative and various perspectives.
At last, I want to again give thanks to Dr. Fun-Den Wang and those Presidents who are promoting MIT OCW in China, and the same thanks also goes to Dr. Dick Yue, the Associate Dean of the Engineering School at MIT. Thank you all for the great work you have done in order to promote this project in Chinese universities!
Once again, may the conference be successful! Thank you! |
