The third CORE Open Education Conference is held in Xi’an, the ancient city of Chinese culture and history. On behalf of Ministry of Education, I congratulate you on the opening of the conference; greet the experts and scholars attending this conference from home and abroad; thank those who are dedicated to the construction and sharing of educational resources.

We all know that the modern society has entered the era of knowledge and economy. The creation, production and dissemination of knowledge, based on the sharing of knowledge and resources, have an increasing impact on the advancement of society. Meanwhile, the development of information technology accelerates the sharing of knowledge and resources and makes the open education and open educational resources popular topics in the world education development.

Regarding the construction and sharing of educational resources as highly significant, Ministry of Education initiated the constructive and demonstrative web courses, case study repositories and test repositories for undergraduate students and three-year college students in 2000. From 2003 to 2007, as a part of the Education Digitalization Program, Ministry of Education initiated the Program of Quality Courses Construction, which was incorporated into the Project of Teaching Quality and Reform for Higher Education, in order to lead and promote the Quality Courses Construction in regional universities and colleges and to gradually establish a multi-disciplinary three-level (university and college, provincial and national) system for the quality courses.

China Open Resources for Education is dedicated to the cause of open education, absorbing high-quality open courseware, advanced instructional technology, and new teaching methodology both domestically and internationally so as to enhance the quality of education in China. As far as I know, the traffic of CORE’s website has reached 5 million hits per year. All the work done by CORE has great importance in terms of improving the quality and equity of education in China. Today, I sincerely express my appreciation to Dr. Fun-Den Wang, CORE staffs and all the universities and professors participating in this cause for their contribution as well as Xi’an Jiaotong University for their efforts and hard work in organizing the conference! I hope we can collaborate to contribute our talents and efforts to the improvement of quality of education and the sharing of educational resources in both China and the world.

At last, I wish you all a wonderful and successful conference.

Zhang, Xinsheng