To further deepen comprehensive education reform, Beijing Municipal Education Commission officially launched the pilot project “Beijing Secondary School Teachers’ Open Online Teaching: Online and Offline Teaching Service (OOTS)” in December 2016. The open online teaching project is implemented by the Advanced Innovation Center for Future Education (AICFE) at Beijing Normal University. Accurate, personalized, and diversified online teaching is available to secondary school students. By building up an education management system of open online teaching with the latest technologies, this platform will facilitate the reform of subject teaching and examination and admission systems in Beijing. The online and offline teaching service project has recruited more than 7,000 award-winning teachers from 16 districts in Beijing to achieve greater access to teachers’ online. The first trial was carried out in 31 secondary schools in Tongzhou District from December 1, 2016 to January 20, 2017, and the second trial from May 26, 2017 to July 12, 2017.
“Online and Offline Teaching Service (OOTS)” means that each learner not only has a teacher for each subject at school, but also correspondingly has a teacher online for one-on-one tutoring. Through the smart public education service system, students can understand their own problems and strengths and get access to personalized and adaptive resources and services through educational data analysis reports.
Teachers can communicate with the students online through screen sharing, real-time audio, and whiteboards that support texts, pictures, and audio in one-on-one tutoring. These functions are made possible through an app installed on mobile devices and computers for students and teachers. Our goal is to make it as effective as face-to-face instruction and anyone can learn at anytime, anywhere, and on any device. We recruit award-winning teachers as online tutors from secondary schools and teacher training institutions, and we encourage other teachers to actively participate in this project.
After a full investigation and analysis of the first trial of the OOTS project, we added appointment, asynchronous Q & A, and micro-lecture functions in the second trial. In order to help students adapt to and master the new approach to tutoring as soon as possible, the staff of AICFE organized many activities for the parents and students to experience the app and OOTS. The OOTS is aimed at students’ emotional gratification and supply-side reform of education. As digital natives, children take mobile devices and the Internet not just as tools but as integral parts of life. Learning online is to develop their information literacy and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) skills.
Different from paid after-class activities and tutoring, the OOTS is free open online teaching to achieve greater access to teachers. This project is to provide a solution for education equity and personalized learning for children in rural and developing areas, so that they can have actual development and gratification. Beijing Municipal Education Commission and AICFE at Beijing Normal University will draw on past experiences of the pilot to expand the scope of the project gradually according to shifting circumstances.
