China and Taiwan Make Headway in e-Learning Collaboration

With continents around the world from Africa to South America, Asia to Europe turning to technology to facilitate and enhance teaching and learning in the classroom, the adoption of e-tools is no longer a question of choice, but rather, a matter of time.

In Asia, Hong Kong and Singapore may be leading the way in e-learning, but its regional neighbours are catching up fast with the likes of Taiwan and China charting remarkable progress in recent years, particularly in the areas of distance learning, collaboration and student engagement.

Distance learning in China has grown at an exponential pace since the late 1990s. A pilot project involving the partnership of 68 Mainland universities, the China Central Radio and TV University has since established 4,580 study centers across the country with nearly a quarter of them located in the country’s Western Region. As of 2008, the system, which mainly offers professional and undergraduate courses, has seen the enrollment of 8.2 million students, of which over half have since graduated.

“In the past decade, the pilot universities have actively explored and practised sharing of quality resources for distance education,” said Dr Yang Zhijian, Deputy Director-General at the Department of Higher Education at China’s Ministry of Education. “We are exceedingly happy to report that great achievements have been made of the teaching model, technological model, learning support services model and even the management structure for distance tertiary education.”

Universities in Mainland China have taken the concept of collaboration a step further by developing a series of online courses to broaden the sharing of quality teaching materials, and promoting the adoption of new pedagogies as a means of strengthening higher education for the future.

Meanwhile, with some 2,663 tertiary institutions serving over 27 million students, universities have also consolidated their resources to develop 3,000 online professional courses in efforts to widen education access for all.

“All of these courses will be freely available to tertiary institutions nationwide, and are to be delivered via the internet hence making quality higher education more widely accessible for the development of human capital,” noted Dr Yang.

While e-learning at the classroom level has helped to promote the adoption of new pedagogies designed to benefit student learning, Dr Yang points out the rate of development among universities in China still varies, with the potential for further improvements to be made.

In Taiwan, collaboration in the virtual learning space is developing as a result of the implementation of a government funded scheme to roll out six teaching/learning resource centers across the island. The concept of these online facilities is to integrate education resources and share in best practices, to create greater value.

Feng Chia University, the co-ordinating hub behind the Central Taiwan Teaching/Learning Resource Center, is a good example demonstrating the effectiveness of teamwork, particularly when universities are willing to work together around a specific area of expertise.

“Universities are used to competing instead of sharing so in order for this model to work, we must identify subjects that are relevant and suitable for collaboration,” said Professor Lee Bing-Jean, Vice President at Feng Chia University’s Department of Civil Engineering.

The Central Taiwan Teaching/Learning Resource Center galvanizes the resources of 13 universities in the centre of the country to share their social and economic data related to the areas of urban planning, architecture and transportation. The center plans to later extend its scope of coverage to other areas of interest.

Drawing together a myriad of tools including library resources, curriculum integration and specialty laboratory exchanges not only enhances collaboration between the partner institutions, but also boosts access to education resources for both students and professors.

“By giving instructors and students actual concrete data to work with, teaching becomes more real and education becomes more interesting. This also helps students and faculty members to overcome the barrier of information gathering, something that would normally be quite difficult to achieve,” explained Professor Lee.

Around the world, the concept of resource sharing among universities is taking shape, facilitated by the development of cutting edge technologies that tend to be wrapped around collaboration, and is further underscored by a rapidly changing knowledge based economy and the openness in education and research.