I. Reform background
At the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the party proposes to prioritize the development of education and online education, which accelerates education modernization and construction of a powerful nation of education. Opinions on Comprehensively Deepening the Reform of Teacher Training in the New Era puts forward that “teachers should actively adapt to new technological changes such as informatization and artificial intelligence, and carry out effective education and instruction”. President Xi Jinping pointed out at Teacher-Student Symposium in the Peking University, “With the continuous development of information technology, the way of knowledge acquisition and imparting, the relationship between teaching and learning have undergone revolutionary changes, which bring higher requirements for teachers’ ability.” Standing at a new historical starting point, comprehensive education reform must focus on the new demand for talent cultivation in the new era, strengthen the perception of talent cultivation based on ability. Take education informatization as an intrinsic variable in the systematic transformation, promote the renewal of educational concepts, model, system reconstruction, and support and lead the development of education modernization.
At present, the supply of public education in China has been unable to meet the increasingly high-end, diversified, individualized, and independent needs. The differences of public educational services between regions, urban and rural areas, and strata are difficult to coordinate. We are facing with the new challenges of providing differentiated and individualized public education service. We have many problems, such as how to meet people's strong demand for educational equality, how to meet the increasingly selective needs of learners and how to effectively reduce burden of studies while ensuring high-level teaching quality. These problems reflect the quantity and structural shortage of high-quality education in China, but its root cause is that traditional public education services can no longer adapt to the more and more diverse modern society.
To achieve quality improvement, balanced development and education equity, improving and enriching public educational services is an effective approach to alleviate and resolve the issues which has to be done in a reformed and innovative way to transform the conventional public education service. The Internet can build a public education service supply system with a sense of gain and maximize the aggregation of social education service resources. At the same time, the Internet has opened up new possibilities for the transformation of education supply with its advantages in resolving problems of education scale and individualization, equity and quality, providing high-quality education services for the society, and reconstructing the education ecosystem.
Entrusted by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, Advanced Innovation Center for Future Education (AICFE) at Beijing Normal University explores new formats and new models of public education service in order to solve the practical problems of basic education. The core objective is to promote the transformation of Beijing public education service from digital to smart, and use the Internet+ idea to help Beijing education deepen comprehensive reform and help build a public service model for education as world-class city.
II. Reform initiatives
(1) Build a smart public education service environment that integrates online virtual reality and offline reality
Internet-based public education service will be an important form of government's public services. Students' learning shifts from traditional single face-to-face classroom teaching to all time, online and offline learning such as mobile learning, flipped classroom, situated learning, and blended learning. This also requires a new and smart public education service environment that can accommodate and support a variety of learning forms. AICFE designed and developed a public service platform based on big data for future smart education – Smart Learning Partner (SLP) Platform. This platform provides individualized teaching service for each student, and realizes “collecting big data during learning process, creating model of knowledge and capability structure, diagnosing and improving learning problems, discovering and enhancing disciplinary advantages”.
In order to achieve the goals above, the big data analysis and service of the SLP platform follows two main tracks. One is data modeling for individual learners, to construct a model of individual feature and find individual needs. The other is data mining for groups, to build a model group with features and find common needs. The main sections include information collection, data processing, data mining, data modeling and smart recommendation. Firstly, through ubiquitous computing technologies like interactive tracking, speech recognition, somatosensory interaction, and contextual awareness, we collect data of learning processes such as online assessment and interaction. Secondly, through coding analysis, text analysis, semantic analysis, pattern recognition, speech recognition, image analysis and video analysis, key features are extracted to digitize the information. Thirdly, group ability is understood with data mining of data clustering, classification, outlier, association, correlation, discrimination, comparison and deviation. In the meantime, through data modeling, knowledge graph and ability map of individual learners are formed. Finally, the platform with recommend learning resources, activities and services according to the analysis results.
(2) Break the closed supply mechanism of educational resources and establish a united front of education content supply
By virtue of the Internet, it is possible to break the traditional rigid and closed supply mechanism of public education resources with schools as the main body. So between different entities, organizations, levels and fields, we can have a dynamic primary public educational resources supply that is efficient and cohesive, highly socialized and diversified under mutual supervision and common development. In addition, we must offer a broad supply of educational resources under the guidance of right consumption concept, paying attention to the students’ real gain from education and establishing a multi-channel education unified front for government, society and schools that serve students.
Reform the resource and service governance mechanism so as to meet the needs of students and form a multi-dimensional cooperation pattern. It is apparently difficult for the government alone to realize basic personalized education, so appropriate mechanisms are needed to allow social institutions and individuals to participate in, a new integrated structure and relationship of educational resources—a multi-faceted cross-border entity, that re-integrate resources provided by diverse cross-border entities in accordance with the quality and normative requirements of public services. Because of this, we can have an ecosystem that meets the individual needs. Especially, when we use some social training institutions as a source in the ‘big system’, we must cooperate with them instead of regulation. The only criteria for them is whether the resources provided can effectively help students.
Creating a good social ecology of basic education reform with a cooperative support system and cross-border governance structure will help break the closed educational resources and service supply mechanism. The intelligent education public service platform Smart Learning Partner (SLP) is a good example. Till June 2018, SLP accumulates more than 13,000 learning resources, gathers 9,500 online teachers and develops 1,500 diagnostic tools. Although the government is the leader and responsible for basic public service, he is not necessarily the only supplier. By establishing a unified frontier for the supply of quality educational content through standardized channels and convergence mechanisms, it can greatly enrich the breadth and depth of public education service.
(3) Achieve precise and personalized public education service supply model
The individualized development of students is difficult to be satisfied in the traditional classroom. Students are not aware of their own academic advantages, so it is difficult to make the best use of them. In the end, they face the awkward situation where they fail the exams. Educational practice is facing serious shortage of differentiated, individualized and precise educational supply. All of these require shifting from traditionally extensive, collective supply to precise, individualized supply. In order to transform and upgrade education supply mode, researchers collect data from learning process, such as students' knowledge, ability and literacy, comprehensive psychological condition and physical health. Through mining and analyzing educational big data, the students' individual development model is constructed so as to provide each one with precise learning resources and learning path, teaching and education services that match their abilities and characteristics.
Big data records the behavior and performance in student’s learning and life, generating the student’s cognitive map through data analysis and modeling, and recommending learning resources, paths, online teachers, partners and group activities. The comprehensive competency report can not only diagnose the student’s learning problems, but also improve student’s learning style and give personal development guidance on aspects such as cognition, personality and preferences.
To run satisfactory education for people is clearly proposed at the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China for education cause. It is a concrete manifestation of the implementation of people-centered development concept that every student can get access to the most optimized development in line with his/her own characteristics. Understanding and satisfying people’s real needs for education should be included in the public education service and provide accurate and individualized public education service supply, so that ‘everyone can succeed and everyone can show his/ her talents’.
(4) Explore award-winning teachers in Beijing to offer ‘online teaching’ and realize the circulation of teachers’ high-quality intellectual resources
In order to allocate excellent teachers in a balanced way, the Advanced Innovation Center for Future Education (AICFE) has innovatively explored individualized public education service supply model as ‘Online Teaching’ — Open Tutoring of Online Teachers. Except for face-to-face tutoring provided by school teachers during school time, each student can also use the Internet in the extracurricular time to find online teachers of each subject after the diagnosis of their subject learning disadvantages and advantages. Students can enjoy one-on-one, individualized, synchronous online tutoring and watch micro-lectures.
With the support of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Education, the open tutoring program has brought together about 9,500 outstanding teachers from 17 districts in Beijing, providing individualized online tutoring for more than 50,000 students in six districts (Tongzhou, Fangshan, Miyun, Yanqing, Pinggu and Huairou). In the first three rounds of 200-day pilot, there were about 150,000 times of online tutoring, and the total length of tutoring was more than 30,000 hours. In addition, more than 1,600 teachers answered over 170,000 questions raised by 5,600 students, and 5,700 or above teacher-made micro-lectures were collected and put on the platform.
The new supply model of teachers’ intelligent service through the Internet is conducive to build a new form of education supply that is led by the government and driven by consumption. It realizes the online circulation and balanced allocation of intellectual resources of teaching. Excellent teachers offer personalized value-added services related to their teaching expertise in open space, so that teachers’ educational service influence and scope can be expanded beyond the boundaries of schools and regions. It is helpful to enhance students’ problem solving abilities and strength-based learning and balance the existing supply structure, which is an effective supplement to traditional classroom learning. We must also give priority to disadvantaged groups, enable low-income families to obtain individualized education, alleviate poverty accurately, and narrow the social gap brought by expensive private tutoring.
(5) Explore data-based service of developmental assessment and diagnosis
There undergoes a transition from single evaluation to comprehensive evaluation, from result-oriented, selective evaluation to process-based, comprehensive evaluation. Based on this, the Advanced Innovation Center for Future Education (AICFE) is actively providing developmental diagnosis and assessment services to teachers, students and parents. Students are evaluated from core disciplinary knowledge, core disciplinary accomplishments, general psychology and cognitive ability, physical health and etc. Tests include personality feature, mental health, cognitive ability, learning quality, subject literacy, subject knowledge, physical health, education environment and developmental orientation, a total of more than 300 indicators of characterization in nine aspects. The purpose of developmental assessment and diagnosis is different from the traditional ones. The purpose is not to label students, but to let students know themselves and find their advantages, mainly fostering their advantages and solving their problems.
Formative and summative evaluation tools like module tests and final tests, test the subject knowledge, capability and literacy, making out an individualized learning map as the foundation to provide individualized resources and services. In pilot areas like Tongzhou and Fangshan, nearly 30,000 students completed 1,500 tests in nine subjects including Chinese, mathematics, English and etc. Psychology and cognition tests analyze students from personality, mental health, cognitive ability, quality of learning, educational environment and developmental tendency, helping students to fully understand themselves. Around 5,000 students completed eight psychological and cognitive assessments. Physical health uses smart bracelet to monitor heart rate, blood oxygen and other data in real time combined with physical health measurement data to monitor students’ health. Students’ individual developmental reports combined with admission policies and expert knowledge recommendation database, which can provide recommendations for students’ growth and development. Students can refer to it and make self-adjustment, such as subject selection for high school and college entrance examinations, improvement of problem-solving skills, exploration of artistic literacy.
(6) Explore new forms of data-based public education service management and evaluation
The use of big data makes the supervision of public education service supply change from empiricism to data-oriented. Through the continuous educational data collection, class, grade and school’s data can be aggregated to draw regional education quality maps and generate analysis reports for administrators and researchers at different levels, who can fully understand the region's advantages and problems in dealing with education reforms. They can take targeted improvement measures to propose an education quality improvement program suitable for the region. Through analyzing educational big data in different dimensions, levels or groups, we can find the common problems shared by different regions and provide educational decision support.
Decentralized management and multi-participation in basic education services have made the traditional, one-way, top-down model of education administration reveal its limitations in monitoring and feedback mechanism. The Internet and big data technology undoubtedly provide an effective solution to openness, transparency, supervision and counterbalance. In managing educational public affairs jointly by government agencies, research institutes, social organizations and citizens, transparent supervision can be achieved.
‘Beijing Education Quality Map’ is a reflection of the modern education governance. This application visualizes the educational resources in Beijing, supports educational resources information sharing among students and parents, and it is beneficial for parents to inquire about enrollment and to select high-quality educational resources. Through the real-time and process data collection and analysis, education administrators can learn population mobility, school distribution, budget of public expenditure, city development plan, and evaluation feedback from parents to adjust policy, and then balance high-quality education resources allocation. Through dynamic monitoring and third-party evaluation, we can strengthen the management and evaluation of public education service too.
III. Effects of reform
(1) Smart education services help core literacy training and enhance students' sense of gain. As for the form of education service, the smart education service provides comprehensive quality assessment and diagnosis, including disciplinary capability assessment, psychological quality assessment and physical health assessment. The abundant assessment report indicators help to construct model in multi-dimensions, helping students understand their ability development from all angles and guiding personal development. Through such practice, nearly 30,000 students in Tongzhou and Fangshan pilot areas have received individual feedback reports. 20,000 students have watched nearly 10,000 video online, with more than 500,000 views.
Open Tutoring of Online Teachers Program provides a strong individualized social network. After online learning, the platform accurately recommends proper online teachers according to students’ advantages and problems showed in assessments. Students can access online tutoring at any time or any place, and online teachers answer all personalized questions. Through the experiment, Online and Offline Teaching Services effectively promoted the teacher resources circulation, and the teachers from relatively developed areas, such as Haidian, Dongshan, Yichang, Chaoyang can provide online service for students in six relatively developing areas – Tongzhou, Fangshan, Miyun, Yanqing, Pinggu and Huairou. One-on-one online tutoring time topped 30,000 hours, and questions raised by more than 50,000 students have been answered in the ‘Q&A Square’.
(2) Tailored teaching and management help improving professional quality and enhancing teachers’ sense of gain. Data service boosts development of teachers’ professional abilities and efficacy of classroom teaching. “Internet + Education” has shed light on teachers’ professional development. The intelligent ‘Class Visit Master’ application no longer uses the pen and paper to take notes, it supporting real-time recording of images, audio, and video. It also structurally presents classroom teaching timeline, students activities, so as to quickly quantifies classroom features and helps teachers to reflect teaching. In addition to teaching reflection, teachers can get the feedback of class’ group data, students’ exam analysis data, tests analysis data, online and offline teaching service data, learning partner data, and subject selection data after a large amount of data aggregation. The data is given to teachers in the form of analytics report, then teachers can rely on the analysis to conduct more tailored instruction. After students’ subject learning data is aggregated, a class teaching map is formed, so that the teachers can visualize the weak points of the class as a whole, and then to discover the teaching emphasis for each class.
Data mining helps to learn each student's personality so that classroom management becomes more efficient. With the systematic support service, teachers can conduct personalized activities, like personalized diagnosis and analysis, learning inspection, learning guidance, and resources recommendation for each student. Students data analysis and mining enable teachers to learn the progress of each student, understand each student’s advantages and problems, and directly provide online individualized service for them. Teachers in Tongzhou are gradually adapting to students management transformation and exploring new management methods.
(3) Online and offline data integration helps to tackle challenges in education reform and enhance school’s sense of gain. Relying on big data, intelligent service realizes regional education quality improvement. Through the intelligent education platform, continuous data collection is realized. Class data, grade data, and school data can be aggregated to form a regional education quality map, so that managers and researchers can fully learn the school’s advantages and problems in dealing with education reform, and find out problems of each education management system respectively, then take targeted improvement measures, to form education quality improvement program suitable for the schools, accurately deploy educational resources, effectively implement comprehensive management, and deepen the practice of education reform.
The Advanced Innovation Center for Future Education (AICFE) integrates BNU’s subject teaching advantages of 11 disciplines such as Chinese, Mathematics, English, Education, Psychology and Sports. It has carried out more than 400 teaching and research activities in four semesters, including open class, online teaching research, interpretation of students’ developmental reports, subject-based training, sub-topic research, etc. These activities have improved the information literacy, data interpretation ability and scientific research ability of teachers in schools.
(4) Home-School interconnection and intelligent feedback for children enhances parents’ sense of gain (by using WeChat). After collecting students’ data and analyzing results, parents can directly obtain the report of the learning process through WeChat. The data are from classroom exercises, daily homework, mid-term and final exams, and online interpersonal relationships. These reports accurately and objectively reflect students’ performance, and provide support for parents to help their children in online tutoring, so their children can get professional guidance through online tutoring recommendation.
Secondly, the ‘Online and Offline Teaching Services’ allows students to receive online tutoring without paying any fees, which reduces the financial burden on parents in a certain extent. Moreover, online tutoring program also reduces time investment for parents. Students use phones and tablets to enjoy high-quality education services in a comfortable environment without leaving the home, saving the time of pick-up. From student questionnaires, parent questionnaire and parent interviews, it is found that the online tutoring pilot has been well accepted and acknowledged by students and parents. It meets the students’ diversified and individualized learning needs. Meanwhile, the quality of online teachers’ tutoring is guaranteed, which enables students to learn better and parents feel more relieved.
(5) The interconnection of data and information enhances regions’ sense of gain. Evaluating the educational quality level by multiple dimensions, levels, groups and factors of educational big data, we find the common problems of the region and provide educational policy-making support.
Based on the data accumulation of Online and Offline Teaching Services and Smart Learning Partner platform, the analysis of questions raised by students and related knowledge points enables us to know the distribution of these questions in different subjects and grades, which helps to explore the common barriers for students and support for subsequent tailored teaching and subject-based teaching and research. Big data reveals the real difficulties faced by students in learning. Based on this, teachers can effectively implement their teaching designs in their teaching research. The interconnection of data and information provides a new model for the improvement of regional education quality, so that teaching research gets efficient and effective.
Taking Tongzhou District as an example, the platforms offer Tongzhou education administrators with comprehensive and objective education problems analysis using data mining technology and spatial analysis to integrate multiple data in education application. The reform provides support in making decision about regional education policy with intelligent algorithms. All these helps to build a data-based, dynamic and real-time education governance model, elevating management efficiency, balanced development of regional education and the overall education quality. With Online and Offline Teaching Services, students of Tongzhou District can enjoy excellent teachers’ tutoring from all districts, especially in Haidian District and Dongcheng District, which relieves ‘the heat of school selection’ and ‘the heat of class selection’, ‘Gaokao migrants’ and other phenomena.
Ⅳ. Reform experiences and enlightenments
First, take the ‘sense of gain’ as the center to transform the ideas of education public service. The supply concept changes from ‘only consume what is suppled’ to a negotiable and coordinative supply concept. This supply view emphasizes the concept of consumption-driven public education service. The core of the satisfied education is to let people gain something and have the sense of gain. Ignoring people’s sense of gain will result all supply to be low-end and ineffective supply.
Second, transform the traditional offline supply into online and offline integrated supply, and provide public education service through Internet. Internet can cross boundaries of time and space to exchange information. It also breaks the limitation of traditional one-way offline education supply, a seamless connection and supplement of online and offline education supply, which enrich the ways and means for different stakeholders to obtain education service.
Third, use the Internet to promote the opening of educational service and to converge the resources of various educational service organizations other than schools. Internet has advantage in information sharing, data fusion, business collaboration and intelligence service. If scientific admission access, standardized evaluation, and standardized regulation are formed, the Internet will promote collaboration and complementation among multiple parties and establish a united front for the supply of educational service to the whole society, forming a jointly constructed, shared, and governed public education service system.
Fourth, accurately diagnose and measure consumers’ (learners) needs for education through the Internet. Accurately learn the needs of each individual with data, give real-time feedback to each learner without large-scale human input and meets the needs of learners’ individualized learning and development.
Fifth, establish a new resources and services governance mechanism to improve the education supply system. To satisfy diversified needs in education, we must provide diversified investment on education. Government should carry out institutional innovation, combined with localized educational needs, purchase resources and services from social education service organizations. The government shall scientifically guide the supply of education service by social institutions to compensate public service, and achieve a win-win situation both for the full coverage of public education service and the development of Internet education service industry.
Sixth, establish an independent, transparent, reliable and multi-dimensional education service evaluation system based on data. From the perspective of education supply quality evaluation, social and third-party agencies will engage themselves more in education service quality evaluation. They integrate advanced evaluation methods like big data and social computing to provide objective and impartial data and information and accurately evaluate the quality and effects of education supply. The open, transparent computing authentication system with big data can not only regulate and promote the positive development of education service, but also ensure the stability and sustainability of education service.
Through the ‘Internet +’, a new supply system will shift the basic public service from management-oriented to service-oriented, from subject-centered to student-centered, from only focusing on learning outcomes to focusing more on learning process. This is the primary direction of modern public education service and an important starting point for supply-side reform in education.
