Lessons of successful distance learning project worth heeding

A DISTANCE LEARNING school started livestreaming the courses of the No 7 High School of Chengdu, a key middle school in Sichuan province, through the internet in classrooms of more than 200 middle schools in poverty-stricken areas in China from 2016. The efforts have made a big difference, as the number of students to obtain university offers through the national college entrance exams since the project was launched has increased dozens of times in some of the schools. Hebei.com.cn comments:

Although it is known that distance learning can help improve the performance of students in poor regions, the results are beyond people's expectations.

To even some education experts' surprise, thanks to the distance learning system, a total of 88 students out of the 72,000 students in the poor regions have been admitted by Peking University and Tsinghua University in Beijing, the top two in China, a new historical high for these areas.

The project can be regarded as a large-sample experiment that should prompt the education authorities to think of ways to provide quality education resources to the needy regions through the internet, which has still not yet been done on a large scale, although it was mentioned years ago.

As the projects indicate, the beneficiaries of distance learning also include the teachers and schools in the less-developed regions, as they can build up their learning curve quickly through watching the live broadcasts of the key school's courses, so they can improve their teaching and management in a short time.

More important, the students' unexpected successful performance in the national college entrance exams has caught the attention of even the counties in which the schools are located, prompting parents to change their minds about higher education.

In some of these regions－where the dropout rate has been high in recent years due to the low education quality of local schools－more and more parents realize that their children can now access better education at local schools, and have a chance to secure a seat in even key universities, so they are more supportive of their children going to school. These positive changes can trigger a set of chain reactions in these underdeveloped regions.

Hopefully, the result of the distance learning project can inspire the authorities to establish a national distance learning system as soon as possible.