As many of you have requested, we would like to provide an overview of some of the important online education-related policy in China, in order to provide context and better evaluate the applicability of the shared practices from China. Therefore, this section will be divided into three parts.

(1) Past policies on the development of MOOC in China

The Ministry of Education (MOE) has released many policies to support and guide the development of MOOC in China since 2015. And by 2019, “China has over 200 million people taking massive open online courses (MOOC), leading the world in both the number and the scale of application of such courses.”

The timeline covers the major policies issued by the Chinese Ministry of Education, and should be able to provide some context and an overview. If there is a particular policy that you are interested in, please let us know and we shall expand on it. Otherwise, it is likely that we will cover at least one or two in future newsletters, as they are instrumental for the development of MOOC in China.

(2) Recent policies by the Ministry of Education in response to the outbreak of COVID-19

Throughout the last two months, the MOE has released multiple policy statements, guidelines and notices directly asking educational institutions to take proper preventive and control measures against the COVID-19. Special considerations were given regarding returning back to the university campus, as the outbreak happened in the midst of the Spring Festival where 3 billion passenger-trips were made to travel home for the celebration.

(3) Example of a recent university-wide policy in response to the outbreak of COVID-19

Tsinghua University “has been able to lead the way in China’s online transition because we had already made decisive moves into online teaching, in an effort to facilitate the learning of post-millennial students,” mentioned on a recent Times Higher Education article by the University Provost. In order to overcome some of the challenges, such as: decision making on management, academic and technical related issues; localization and implementation of guidelines and policies; sustainability in the long-run, Tsinghua University has recently created three major policies recently:

3.1Formed three committees to support the transition from traditional classroom learning to online classroom learning:

Online Learning Advisory Committee,

Online Learning Quality Assurance Committee,

Online Learning Technical Assurance Committee.

3.2 Online Education Office to support each School or Department:

To create their own online learning plan

To organize 100+ technical TAs and 400+ volunteers to deal with issues from both faculty and students

To conduct weekly reviews

3.3 Promote university-level research for online learning beyond COVID-19: from policy-making to learning assessment to stakeholder attitudes and engagement