e-China

Seeing Carlton Robinson's blog on international trends in distance education inspired me to investigate what is going on in China. I stumbled on an article on the China Radio International english website titled Virtual Academia Forges Closer Links with China.

The article suggests that while students in the UK are already starting to take less expensive degree courses at universities in the US via the Internet, many may soon start considering Chinese universities as a viable alternative. Chinese universities for their part are eager to open their doors to foreign students and there is a new project titled e-China that is a collaboration between the Higher Education Funding Council for England (Hefce), the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) and the Chinese Ministry of Education. The project was launched in March 2003 and has so far consisted of three pilot projects and four online joint ventures between Chinese and UK universities.

There are some cultural and technical barriers that have to be overcome. For example, there needs to be training on effective communication with mixed nationality cohort groups. There are also some technical problems and intellectual property issues that have to be ironed out with face to face meetings. The main goal of the program is to cooperate on design and commercial exploitation of online distance learning in both countries.

There are already 68 Chinese universities providing distance learning, but for the most part this is mainly within China itself, so many of these institutions want to develop revenue streams with foreign institutions. Tsinghua University and Beijing Foreign Studies University are two lead institutions that are cooperating with the UK, the later of which now offers masters level programs online. Beijing Foreign Studies University alone already has 30,000 distance learning students across China.

The e-China project has built a link between the UK higher education grid Janet and it's Chinese equivalent Cernet. However, due to bandwidth problems with Cernet, this is not the main platform. Most courses are designed to be hosted locally in China, and many e-China courses are designed to be operated on Moodle.

Thusfar, the exchange has demonstrated a fundamental difference between the approach to distance learning in the UK and China. In the UK, distance learning technology is seen as a way to increase participation and interaction between students and teachers. Whereas in China, it is seen as a way to deliver video lectures across vast distances to reach more remote areas.