[Book 1]  Blended: Using Disruptive Innovation to Improve Schools

Recommended by Xiaoxiao Wang (General Secretary, PRC Ministry of Education Research Center for Online Education)

"Information and communications technology enables us to better apply the theory of learning science to teaching and learning, promoting the efficiency and effectiveness of learning, and letting us realize again that learning itself is something we must continuously learn how to do," said Xiaoxiao Wang.

This book is especially insightful as we move back to campus learning. Many leaders of higher education have said that campus learning will be different, but yet we would argue many of us know as much about "blended learning" as we did about emergency remote learning that we are currently in. This research-based book could be good starting blocks.

[Book 2] Educated: A Memoir

Recommended by Shuaiguo Wang (President, xuetangX.com)

Educated gives readers an opportunity to think about one of life's, perhaps most recently one of online education's, most important and difficult questions—what does it mean to change one’s life, and what are the costs of real change?"

There is no doubts that online education has made and will continuously to make a huge impact to students and faculty around the world. Therefore, as one of the biggest online education platform in the world, xuetangX is extremely grateful to have that opportunity to think carefully about every decision we make. And this book helps all of us to put a powerful story behind the number of learners whom proudly serve.

During an interview, the author said, "I don't think education is so much a state of certainty but a state of inquiry," and "being educated is less about knowing more about something, but more about knowing more about someone."Since the crisis, xuetangX chose to step up and transformed ourselves from a blended learning in-classroom tool to a synchronous learning online platform. xuetangX is fully aware that learning is much more than watching lecture videos and we are excited about some of the past and future innovation that will enable more learners to be "educated".

[Book 3] Leading Matters: Lessons from My Journey

Recommended by Prof. Bin Yang (Vice President and Provost, Tsinghua University; Executive Director, International Center for Engineering Education (ICEE) under the Auspices of UNESCO)

Though this book is not directly related to online education, but this book was written by Prof. John Hennessy (former President of Stanford University, "the godfather of Silicon Valley", and Chairman of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company) who has been instrumental in promoting and enabling the MOOC and online learning movement, and provides valuable lessons about leadership that brings innovation. For example, in 2012, he made a comparison in an article saying, "online learning can be as revolutionary to education as digital downloads were to the music business". 

Here are three takeaways for online education:

“It's hard to change the world in 90 days”

“A Good crisis is a terrible thing to waste”

“Online learning is not about online, it's about learning”

(1) “It's hard to change the world in 90 days”

"Leadership as service" is one of the hardest to achieve: whether as the President of a university, a teaching faculty member, or researcher, we are in a position to serve a lot of leaners, staff and our community directly to indirectly. Additionally, it is sometimes very easy to forget that leadership is a service over a period of time too, this is particularly important during this period of emergency remote learning. The book reminded us the importance of thinking long term and about the future.

Though there are a lot of business books about "shareholder value", but we should not just think about creating shareholder value in the next quarter, instead the author proposed that we should think about creating shareholder value five years from now. This kind of long-term thinking foster a different way of thinking: "for example, you better make sure you are treating your customers and your users well; and make sure your employees are really committed to the company, otherwise if they walk out the door – you are not going to have a company five years from now," Prof. John Hennessy once said during a book-tour interview. "We need to focus on long-term thinking more," especially as we are planning the upcoming academic year when considering integrating technology into the programming.

(2) “A Good crisis is a terrible thing to waste” 

The book also mentioned that progress and innovation require taking "necessary risk"; and of course we should avoid taking "stupid" risk but "smart" necessary risk instead. The current crisis is a great "excuse" to those "smart necessary risks" which would have received a lot of resistant previously.

Hennessy argues that Innovation is especially important in higher education. This is because it is very easy for universities to get trapped in the past, after all universities are the preservers of past knowledge and learning. If universities don't go forward and think about what we could do next, then we will be condemned to be like museum that don't do new things or places that are just old and contain information — though storing knowledge may be one role of higher education, but this doesn't have to be the only future.

(3) "Online learning is not about online, it's about learning"

The book spoke a lot about increasing access and reaching more students, for example, the potential expansion of a Stanford campus in New York. Additionally, a sector that Stanford enjoyed great success for expanding education to more learners is continuing education, lifelong education — which focus largely on people who already have a degree and they are looking to enhance their skills, thus, they are also careful with the use their time. However, Stanford has struggled more is to see what role online education can play in enhancing or reaching other nontraditional students.

Hennessy suggested one interesting area that he has always wanted to see addressed, "how do you deal with the number of students that need remedial coursework before they're really ready to go to college. That's something we should be trying to do online." Though Hennessy added, "learning is a much more complicated human-centered process than watching a video, let it wash over you, and it happens. It's about motivation. It's about people, individuals and their ability to focus on something, to try something hard, to get a problem wrong and then go back and fix that and understand the material. And so our learning systems in order to support that are going to have to be a lot more sophisticated than we initially thought."