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• Action Schemes for Invigorating Education Towards the 21st Century on the China Education and Research Network (CERNET) Website

The Chinese government believes that modernisation of education by applying information technology, a process referred to as educational “informationisation” is essential in order to transform the heavy population burden into valuable human resources.

Long-term Goals

The aim is to meet the following goals by 2010:

• ICT-based infrastructure which covers the whole country will be set up.
• ICT education will be popularised in the most places.
• The competence of ICT application for all Chinese citizens will be improved.
• There will be enough ICT specialists to meet social development needs.
• A lifelong education system will be in place.
• Software producing centres and ICT corporations will be operational.
• The general level of infrastructure development and ICT application in education will rank at the top level among developing countries.
• For universities, and for 85 per cent of the technical/vocational schools and primary and secondary schools in the developed areas of China, the level of infrastructure development and ICT application will match that of developed countries.

Strategies

To realise these goals, the Chinese government will push forward the application of information technology in education on three strata. One is to spread and use educational technology in schools with multi-media computer technology as the core. Another is to promote the popularisation and application of networks. The third is to develop modern distance education, to build up and provide extensive network resources and to establish a life-long learning system. Specifically, strategies are as follows:

• Increase the bandwidth of the main lines of China Education and Research Network (CERNET), which is currently linked to over 70 cities and 400 institutions of higher learning, with more than 2.5 million users, 25 per cent of all network users in China.Extend coverage towards the West and include small cities
• Enhance the province and city networks of CERNET in order to supply good quality service to all kinds of education institutes with 2.5 Gbps bandwidth
• Construct a wide band satellite-based network (CEBsat) and combine that with Internet (CERNET) in order to supply multiple information transmission services for the entire country, particularly remote and rural areas
• Enhance university campus network construction, particularly in the western part of China, and develop a digital information platform to support an e-library, an information management system and a distance education system
• Enhance campus network construction in primary and secondary schools, particularly in village areas, launch the course "ICT Education" in most schools and integrate ICT into the curriculum of middle technical/vocational schools
• Improve education administration informationisation by constructing platforms for officials, resources and public information
• Increase the number and quality of ICT specialists to spread ICT education in primary and secondary schools, to train teachers in information literacy and to provide inservice training about information literacy for adult and vocational students
• Facilitate sharing of teaching resources in order to improve the quality of education by developing a distributed education resource platform
• Launch research on second generation networks and conduct trials in selected central cities
• Develop policies regarding education enterprises that will encourage more financial investment and support development of ICT corporations
• Develop quality standards for education informationisation and use them to develop evaluation systems
• By 2002, over 10 million school teachers and several hundred thousand headmasters had taken training courses through continuing education, especially in computer application and information technology.

China aims both to establish 6000 distance education centres in Western China by 2003, and to connect 90 per cent of primary and secondary schools to the Internet by 2010.