From January 1st 2022, Beijing Middle School Teachers Open Online Tutoring Project, also known as Expert-Based Collective Advising Mechanism (ECAM) is open to around 330,000 students from 646 schools in Beijing. ECAM project entrusts Advanced Innovation Center for Future Education (AICFE) from Beijing Normal University to establish a service platform to recruit in-service teachers with intermediate and above titles of teaching skills in middle schools and teacher training institutions in Beijing. The tutoring subjects include Chinese, mathematics, English, ethics and law, physics, chemistry, biology, history and geography. The tutoring time is 18:00 to 21:00 from Monday to Friday of each semester as specified in the academic calendar (holidays and winter and summer vocations are not included). During the tutoring, teachers use a desktop or laptop computer with the help of digital pens, and students use mobile terminals such as mobile phones and iPad to jointly realize real-time online tutoring based on audios, pictures, and texts. The tutoring includes the following four forms:
One-on-one synchronous tutoring. Students can choose their own tutors. Or the system will automatically recommend tutors with relevant expertise according to the student’s knowledge level, subject, learning background, and learning data, etc.
One-to-many synchronous tutoring (live classes). Teachers could conduct real-time online teaching and tutoring for multiple students at the same time by setting online tutoring topics in advance, opening appointment for simultaneously tutoring, and recording courses for students to learn after class.
Questions and Answer Center (Q&A Center). Students could ask questions through describing them in various ways, such as words and pictures. The system firstly starts intelligent retrieval in the existing question bank. After successful matching, it recommends the analysis of similar questions and related knowledge learning resources. If there are no relevant resources, the teacher will voluntarily answer the questions.
Micro-lectures. Teachers can upload micro-lectures representing their teaching expertise to the cloud platform, which will allow students to freely browse and study.
Figure 1 One-on-one Tutoring from the Student’s View
Figure 2 One-on-one Tutoring from the Teacher’s View
ECAM is conceived in the context of the reform of the high school entrance examination, which is jointly issued by Beijing Municipal Education Commission and Beijing Municipal Finance Bureau. It is an important step to implement the “strengthening and improving the free online learning service”, “organizing excellent teachers to carry out free online interactive answering questions services”, “improving open interactive answering questions service to benefit more students” in the “ease the burden of excessive homework and off-campus tutoring for students undergoing compulsory education (double reduction)” document of the central government and the Beijing Committee of the Communist Party of China. Through the cross-region and cross-school online circulation of high-quality teacher service, the project solves the problems of individualization in student’s learning process and reflects the concept of taking students as the center, protects and promotes their advantageous subjects, and pays attention to both maximizing student’ s strengths and making up for their weaknesses.
Figure 3 ECAM Helps Students with Individualized Problems
ECAM started the first stage of pilot work in Tongzhou District in November 2016 and started the second stage in March 2018. The scope of implementation was expanded to Pinggu District, Miyun District, Huairou District, Yanqing District, and Fangshan District. In October 2019, it entered the third stage and expanded to Daxing District, Mentougou District, and Economic Development Zone, covering more than 90,000 students in 187 junior high schools and recruiting more than 14,600 teachers on the platform. During the “Thirteenth Five-Year Plan” period, a total of more than 70,000 junior high school students received 2 million tutoring in more than 300,000 hours. The implementation effect of the project in the first three stages is generally good, effectively realizing the online circulation of intellectual resources of teachers’ and providing opportunities for junior high school students in 8 remote suburbs and Economic Development Zone, which helps students to communicate with outstanding teachers who specialize in the specific content area. The project expands the influence of high-quality teacher resources, promotes the balanced development of education between different regions, and becomes a useful supplement to public basic education services. Based on the previous survey of teachers and students and the tracking analysis of the effect of tutoring, it shows that the satisfaction of teachers and students with online tutoring is above 90%.
Figure 4 Teachers Provide Tutoring Services at Home.
Shengquan Yu, Executive Director of AICFE, believes that the application results of ECAM are that: firstly, it has innovated the government-led personalized education of public service models; secondly, it has increased the opportunities for students to obtain high-quality teacher services, helped students solve individualized problems through multiple channels, and improved students ‘subject knowledge, ability, literacy, and interest in learning; thirdly, it reduces the burden of education and improve the family’s sense of educational gain; fourthly, it supports teachers’ precise teaching, teaching research, and professional development through the mechanism of “online data feeds back offline teaching research”; fifthly, through the dynamic exchange and integration of information and data, it promotes the evolution of the overall regional education ecology which combines with the online and offline education.
Figure 5 ECAM Realizes Innovative Configuration of High-quality Teacher Services Based on the Internet
Li Yi, Deputy Secretary of the Education Committee of the Beijing Committee of the Communist Party of China and first-level inspector, believes that online tutoring is a powerful means to promote the balanced development of education and an important part of building a high-quality education system. Teachers achieve redistribution of high-quality service through “going online”, which is an important measure to improve people’s educational satisfaction, especially students’ actual sense of achievement.
Figure 6 The Students Orientation
Figure 7 The Students Orientation
