Keywords

1 Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has been the worst shock to education systems in a century, with over 1.6 billion children and youth being unable to attend school for months, and many still not back in school today (UNESCO, 2020). To keep education going, schools across the globe were forced to shift their everyday teaching and learning practices towards remote, online modes of instruction. As the first country to encounter the COVID-19 outbreak, China has effectively battled this crisis, making a series of fast and decisive responses to minimize its impact on education. Shortly after the outbreak, the Chinese government launched the “Classes Suspended but Learning Continues” emergency plan, which urged schools to close and shift their teaching and learning activities entirely online (MOE, China, 2020c). Yet the country faced a variety of difficulties in implementing the emergency plan given its condition: as the most populous nation worldwide, with 270 million students shifting simultaneously to online studies, how could it build and maintain the technological infrastructures to ensure the smooth delivery of online education at such as a massive scale? In the face of sudden outbreaks, how could it prepare teachers for urgent remote teaching demands and to ensure the quality of online education? As a developing country, with a few rural areas where students still do not have access to digital devices and Internet connections, how could it prevent digital inequalities from amplifying education inequalities when formal education could only be accessed online?

This chapter provides a critical account of how China overcame these difficulties and successfully continued education for students at all levels during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, the paper illustrates “Classes Suspended but Learning Continues” government emergency plan in detail, together with the various measures executed to support the smooth implementation of the plan. Second, the paper reflects on the lessons learned as the country navigated educational challenges and sought solutions amid the complex and uncertain pandemic situation. Third, the paper elaborates on the challenges encountered in this process and suggests directions for future research. As the COVID-19 situation appears to be stabilizing in most countries, systemic reviews are being undertaken worldwide to evaluate the types of education provided during the pandemic. We hope that sharing China’s experience in this chapter can contribute to the ongoing global conversations on how to better prepare education in times of crisis.

2 Implementation of the ‘Class Suspended but Learning Continues’ Emergency Plan

In late January 2020, shortly after the COVID-19 outbreak, the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) issued a notice on postponing the start date of the spring semester and initiated the “Classes Suspended but Learning Continues” emergency plan, the latter urging all schools to close and shift their teaching and learning activities entirely online (MOE, China, 2020c). In response, schools across the country, including K–12 institutions, colleges, and universities, pushed back their spring semester start dates and switched to teaching classes online. To support the implementation of the emergency plan, the central government, local authorities, educational institutions, and enterprises made collective efforts to address the most salient needs; including enriching the provision of online learning resources, strengthening the supply of technological infrastructure, addressing digital inequalities, and training teachers for new modes of instruction. This section illustrates the key policies initiated and measures taken under the emergency plan.

2.1 Enriching the Provision of Online Learning Resources

What counts the most for continuing education during the pandemic is the access to and availability of quality online learning resources. A series of policies and measures were introduced to enrich the provision of such resources. On February 17, 2020, the MOE launched the “National Network Cloud Platform” online portal to host learning resources for primary and secondary schools (National Center for Educational Technology, 2020). The platform provided learning materials for schools to conduct teaching online, and is capable of supporting simultaneous usage by 50 million students. By May 2020 students and teachers from all 31 mainland provinces had visited the portal over 2 billion times (MOE, China, 2020a). Additionally, China Education TV launched a new channel to expand channels for disseminating courses and learning resources. Its broadcasts were able to reach the remote rural areas across the country where cable TV was not readily available (China Education Network Television, 2020).

For higher education, the MOE released its “Guidance on the organization and management of online teaching and learning in regular higher education institutions during the epidemic prevention and control period” on February 4, 2020 (MOE, China, 2020b). The document requested higher education institutions to adopt online platforms for supporting remote learning, recommending 22 platforms capable of providing 24,000 courses for free, of which most were built by top Chinese universities or enterprises. The course materials offered include massive open online courses (MOOCs), small private open courses (SPOCs), and virtual simulations covering 12 disciplines at the undergraduate level and 18 at higher vocational levels. Consequently, more than half of Chinese higher education institutions began the spring semester online using existing online course content and live-streamed classes.

Certain provincial-level education departments also made fundamental efforts in developing digital resources. For instance, the Shanghai municipal government built “Classroom in the Air”, a large-scale learning platform for its primary and secondary students. Moreover, the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission organized over 1000 outstanding leading teachers from various levels and disciplines to form over 100 teaching teams. Based on curriculum standards and basic teaching requirements, over 5000 high-quality teaching resources for all disciplines, from the kindergarten to the senior secondary level, were developed and distributed to millions of students in Shanghai, as well as across the country through the Internet and television. Each of the “Classroom in the Air” courses started with a 20-min whole-class lecture, followed by 20 min of teacher-student interactions where teachers provided personalized guidance to individual students. These learning resources provided timely support for the continuation of primary and secondary education in Shanghai.

Lastly, the People’s Education Press opened its digital teaching resource library to all students, enabling them to access it for free. Certain large educational institutions across the country also offered free digital resources for primary and secondary school students during the pandemic.

2.2 Strengthening the Supply of Technological Infrastructure

A smooth transition to remote online teaching also depends greatly on the availability of robust and stable technological infrastructure. Regarding Internet connectivity, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued a notice on March 3, 2020 announcing plans to strengthen broadband coverage during the pandemic to support online education (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 2020). Soon afterwards on March 16, 2020 the MOE released guidelines pledging to better apply information technology in primary and secondary schools to ensure universal access to quality education (Xinhua News Agency, 2020). As a result of these policies, the home bandwidths of schoolteachers and students were increased free of charge. Certain provinces even subsidized their students’ access to online education. For instance, Liaoning Province paid a total of seven million RMB in subsidies to around 20,000 higher education students, helping them pay for Internet access or digital devices (Liu, 2020).

2.3 Addressing Digital Inequalities

An important feature of China’s educational policies during the pandemic was the significant attention given to poor areas and disadvantaged students. Although the broadband coverage is very high nationwide, with the Internet penetration had reached 70.4% (China Internet Network Information Centre, 2021), a few very remote areas remained where an Internet connection was not in place and students’ families could not afford the appropriate equipment to access online learning resources. This digital inequality could hinder students from effectively carrying out online learning, in turn amplifying educational inequalities. To ensure that disadvantaged children could enjoy the same quality in educational resources, the Chinese central government gave priority to areas with urgent Internet needs by installing broadband networks and providing free online learning equipment (Xue et al., 2020).

2.4 Measures Implemented by Local Authorities

Based on the central government’s emergency plan, each province and locality introduced corresponding measures and regulations according to local situations. For instance, the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission organized the development of unified online courses for their “Classroom in the Air” platform, which teachers in different schools could then customize for their individual classes. Other provinces made specific regulations for the safe use of device screens and online tools to preserve students’ health and wellbeing. For instance, the Provincial Education Department in Shandong recommended that the duration of individual teaching activities should be kept to 15–20 min for primary students and 25–30 min for junior secondary students. In addition, the total duration of online study should be no more than 80 min/day for primary students, 120 min for junior secondary students, and 180 min for senior secondary students.

3 Experiences

The policies introduced and measures implemented during the pandemic achieved positive results, successfully maintaining the provision of education for over 200 million students across the country. The following section describes the lessons learned as we reflect on our practices in response to this crisis.

First, reflecting on the nationwide endeavor to overcome the restrictions created by COVID-19, we found that an effective crisis response mechanism is a combination of an overarching plan by the central government and more subtle approaches by local governments. A top down-approach is needed in term of overarching plan and the management of the free flow of resources at the national level; then followed by more subtle approaches that balances a certain amount of top-down initiative at the beginning with larger amount of attention then being paid to local conditions. Across China, educational resources in different provinces vary with respect to the quality of teaching staff, the number of digital resources available, and the ability to produce digital resources. For example, Shanghai is outstanding in terms of the quality of its teaching staff and the strong executive power of the municipal education departments. The city was thus able to develop many high-quality online courses in a very short time, even considering the extraordinary period of the pandemic (Liu & Ye, 2021).

Second, there should be a sufficient number of digital resources, which are the very foundation of online learning. In China, the various types of digital resources available to students during the pandemic greatly supported the continuation of primary and secondary education.

Third, it is important to foster a culture of experimentation in which teachers, as frontline education providers, are encouraged to develop novel instructional approaches to meet their students’ needs according to their local conditions. A teacher in Beijing shared in an interview: “Online teaching and offline teaching should perform their respective duties, and offline learning cannot be copied to online teaching. That is not effective. The function of live broadcasting should be to organize students’ learning and make children learn better offline, rather than dragging all the children online” (China National Radio, 2020). The teacher also noted that teachers should give fewer lectures and more guidance, especially on learning methods. In her opinion, teachers should spend time on communicating with their students, and also consider combining pre-recorded and live broadcasts when appropriate. Her personal approach also included organizing students into study groups and stimulate independent study. The successes of her experiences are worth learning.

Finally, shifting to online education created a substantial need for educational resources. It is important to encourage the active participation of different social forces and to pool various resources to ensure a sufficient supply of such resources. During the pandemic, people from all sectors across China paid close attention to education. Large educational institutions and enterprises provided students with free, high-quality educational resources. Additionally, collaboration and the sharing of resources across sectors are also important. During the pandemic, the online classrooms for each province were hosted on a single national network, enabling inter-regional communication and the sharing of high-quality resources.

4 Challenges

The major challenges China encountered while implementing fully online education include the following. First, online learning places a significant demand on students’ attention, study habits, and autonomous learning abilities. How to transform students from passive learners into independent learners remains a huge challenge for online education. In a survey of over 70,000 primary and secondary students conducted by the Institute for Education Policy at Beijing Normal University, self-consciousness and self-discipline were found to be important factors affecting students’ home-based online learning, with 37% of participating students reporting that they were “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with both (Wang et al., 2020). Preparing students to be independent and take responsibility for their own learning is therefore an important first step for quality online learning.

Second, while students learned at home during periods of social distancing, they did not have the engaging physical and social environments they experienced at school. The loss of a sense of community posed a significant challenge to students while they studied remotely from home. In our survey of over 12,000 students from 33 provinces across China about their online learning experiences at home and their evaluations of such experiences during the pandemic, 80% of participants were not satisfied with learning at home, and 80% thought that home was not as good of a learning environment as school.

Third, studying remotely and fully online was a sudden, novel experience for students. Although governments and teachers made enormous efforts to provide guidance and help, students found the support they received to be insufficient. In our survey conducted on student experiences of online learning, 76% of participants reported that they could not get enough timely help when they encountered difficulties in learning, and 72% indicated that they did not receive timely attention when they were under great psychological pressure (The Information Technology Education in Primary and Secondary School Professional Commission of Chinese Society of Education, 2020). Future research ought to be conducted to explore the types of support that should be provided from students’ perspective so that we can know how to serve our students better during these extraordinary times when education is disrupted.

Finally, many teachers reported difficulties in engaging students remotely during online teaching. Due to the physical absence of their students, teachers had less observational or incidental information to identify and respond to students’ learning issues (i.e., requiring feedback or clarification). Given that virtual learning environments differ greatly from physical classrooms, the pedagogical approaches that are effective should also differ between both (Moore & Diehl, 2018). As we have observed, teachers mainly used digital resources and tools to replicate the learning activities they experienced in classrooms as closely as possible, and thus encountered difficulties and limitations in the virtual environments. This issue indicates the research need of developing effective technology-mediated online pedagogies that can better engage students studying remotely. In addition, learning analytics techniques should be employed to help monitor students’ learning process and identify struggling students for teachers’ timely interventions.

5 Conclusion

This chapter has provided a critical account of the collective efforts made by different sectors in China to maintain the continuation of education at all levels during the pandemic, including (1) the major national policies initiated; (2) a reflection on the country’s experience of successfully maintaining the provision of education; and (3) an elaboration of the challenges encountered. Although the COVID-19 situation is stabilizing in China currently, our work exploring the full potential of online education is ongoing. What has been made clear through this pandemic is the importance of sharing and disseminating experience across national borders and societies. We hope that the China’s experience shared in this chapter can contribute to the ongoing international conversations on how to better prepare education in times of crisis.