A Study on the Construction of Open Curriculum for International Students Based on OBE Concept ()
Countermeasures
1. Introduction
MOOC/Massive open online Course (MOOC/Massive Online Course), a product of “Internet plus education”, is characterized by scale and openness. Open online courses break the time and space constraints of learning, making it possible for everyone to learn from time to time and place. The origin of online open courses in China can be traced back to April 2003. When the Ministry of Education issued the notice on launching the construction of top-quality courses of teaching quality and teaching reform engineering in institutions of higher learning, it went through three stages: Quality Video Open Course, quality resource sharing course, and online open course. In 2015, “the Ministry of Education on strengthening the application and management of online open courses” published that China’s online open courses construction progressed faster. In early 2018 and early 2019, the Ministry of Education launched 1291 “national quality online open courses”, further promoting the development of online open courses.
During the COVID-19, the Ministry of Education issued the “Epidemic Prevention and control during the information to support education and teaching notice”." In order to carry out the spirit of “no suspension” in the notice, universities make full use of online open courses for online teaching, and the construction and application of online open courses have made it more significant development. The online open curriculum has the characteristics of sharing, opening, autonomy, and cooperation, which can reduce the epidemic’s impact on the teaching order of colleges and universities, break the monopoly of educational resources, and promote the reform of teaching quality. During the epidemic, 942,000 courses and 1.18 billion online courses were offered nationwide (Jian & Xiang, 2020) [1].
Although MOOCs are not specifically aimed at international students in China, compared with other courses, their global, trans-regional and trans-disciplinary characteristics can better meet the needs of international students in China (Han, 2016) [2]. This research summarizes the current situation of the construction of online open courses in China. It puts forward corresponding countermeasures and suggestions based on the experience and problems of online teaching for international students during the COVID-19 to adapt to the new teaching model of the “human-computer interaction” era. According to the characteristics of online teaching, this research provides a reference for the construction, research, and online teaching of online open courses for international students in China.
2. The Status of Open Online Courses of International Students
The Current Situation of Online Open Courses for International Students in China
There are about 20 influential online open courseware platforms in China. They are Chinese University MOOC, classroom online, wisdom tree, Netease class, Netease Open Class, Super Star Erya, Hua Yunmu class, Chinese University Foreign Language MOOC platform, Tencent class, duobei net, Xueyin Online, Baidu Pass class, Superior Class Online, Superior Class Alliance, Good University Online, Superior College, Human Health MOOC, Anhui Online Course Learning Center, Chongqing University Online Open Course Platform, Zhejiang University online open course sharing platform. Some achievements have been made in constructing online open courses for Chinese students studying in China. Many courses have been put online and used, providing a curriculum guarantee for online teaching during the epidemic period. It conforms to the trend of teaching networks, and digitalization in the significant data era promotes the reform of the teaching model of the courses for international students in China. It plays a leading role in creating an online “gold course”. However, according to the “one-degree gender”, the criterion of “high-level, innovative, and challenging” put forward by the Ministry of Education, the following problems still exist in the online courses:
1) The number of courses offered and the number of accredited courses is relatively small.
Fewer than 20,000 people participated in nine courses, For example, Prof Liao from East China University of Science and Technology taught “overview of Chinese culture” to international students, and this course got a high reputation among international students. However, some courses have fewer than One thousand participants, and three have fewer than 100 participants. It can be seen that only a few courses have a large number of participants and a high degree of participation, most courses have a small number of participants, and the overall impact of the courses is unbalanced.
2) The initial size of the number of participants and the uneven influence of the courses.
According to statistics, during the COVID-19, the total number of international students participating in China was more than 975,000, and the number of participants initially saw the scale. In addition, during the outbreak, dozens of universities engaged in teaching international students to carry out mixed teaching. However, the statistics of all courses show that most courses have less than 20,000 participants, some of which have fewer than 100 participants. These numbers show that most courses have fewer participants than expected, and the overall impact of the courses is uneven. The aim of large-scale sharing of online Open Course Ware is not achieved.
3) The course content is more comprehensive, and there are fewer non-English courses than other courses.
Although a wide range of courses has been offered across the country, full-foreign language courses are minimal, which is not conducive to the hybrid teaching of foreign student courses during the epidemic.
4) Uneven distribution of online platforms.
In the era of big data, the “Internet plus education” has become a conventional technology in higher education. Although the construction of online open courses for international students in China has made some achievements, the teachers have not enough understanding of the importance of online open courses, and their enthusiasm is not high. According to incomplete statistics, there are about 942,000 online open courses in China, but the proportion of online open courses that are put into use effectively is less than 0.05%. In 2018 and 2019, the Ministry of Education recognized 1,291 “national online quality open courses”." Only 0.05% of the total number of “national online top-quality open courses” are offered to international students in China. Some teachers and students were trapped by using the Internet and a lack of teaching materials and materials. However, due to the small number of courses, there is no way to deal with the sudden large-scale online learning needs. There are even some courses due to the number of students more frequently stuck phenomenon, affecting the quality of learning.
It can be seen that the distribution of the online platform of the curriculum is uneven and needs to be adjusted in the follow-up construction work. There are about 20 influential online open course platforms in China. Only ten offer courses for international students, and the other platforms offer few courses for international students.
5) There are fewer “double-first-class” institutions among the institutions offering courses.
There are 32 colleges and universities offering online open courses, of which only 12, including Peking University, Central South University, Nanjing University, and Shandong University, account for 37.5 percent. In addition, Peking University offers both courses in technology and Shandong University courses in Russian. Fortunately, six foreign-language schools (including vocational ones) offer online courses, accounting for 18.7% of the total.
6) Uneven distribution of the provinces and cities where the courses are held.
The provinces with more courses are Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Beijing, Guangdong, and other coastal or economically developed areas. However, universities in some provinces have yet to build online courses for international students, and Midwestern Sectional FigureSkating Championships universities have not participated in constructing online open courses for international students.
7) Some courses should be developed with less emphasis on application.
The importance of online courses lies in their construction and application. According to the inquiry of various course platforms, some of China’s online open courses have not been fully used in teaching after the construction. The interaction with students is not sufficient, the information has not been updated in time, and it is suspected that they have been built and abandoned, which goes against the original intention of the construction online.
3. Discussion and Suggestions
The construction of online open courses aims at the organic combination of “technological refinement” and “humanistic care”, solving the problem of “teaching effectiveness” (Yang, 2019) [3]. It is the performance of modern technology leading learning, is the product of the integration of the Internet and higher education, and is also one of the signature projects of creating 3000 online “golden courses” in the “six excellences and one Top” Plan 2.0, which the National Education Conference decided in 2018. The use of online open courses “break the traditional monopoly of teaching, brings Gentle competitive pressure to teaching, and will significantly improve the quality of higher education” (Sun, 2016) [4]. During the epidemic period, teachers in colleges and universities implemented online teaching by using the existing online open courses based on the network platform to reduce the epidemic’s impact on teaching.
3.1. To Grasp the Characteristics of MOOCs and Create a “Golden Class”
An online open course, also called “MOOC”, is a network video teaching resource with refinement, openness, interaction, and multi-modality characteristics. Therefore, when designing the content of online open courses, we must grasp these characteristics, design the course in line with mobile terminal learning, and create an online-“gold course”. Here is how to grasp conciseness and conciseness. Open online courses are delivered as videos for students to watch and learn on the web. Its content must cater to the characteristics of online learning and must not be “old wine in a new bottle”, the traditional classroom teaching recorded into a video online. In general, the length of a single session of an online course is much less than the 45 minutes of a traditional class, preferably 5 - 10 minutes. By analogy, content design from “short, small, fine, dry” to “small” strives for a video segment to solve a professional problem. Especially during the outbreak, teachers and students in the network environment are different, and most international students use mobile phones for online learning. The refined teaching content not only helps the students to understand and master in a limited time but also meets the needs of students in a poor network environment, and is in line with the characteristics of small-screen reading on mobile phones, to achieve the “time learning, learning everywhere” effect of mobile learning.
3.2. To Grasp the Openness and Choose the Topic Strictly
As the name implies, the online open curriculum has inherited the idea of open education and has the characteristics of opening, maintaining, and learning. Anyone can choose to learn at any time with a large audience. Therefore, the topic selection for online courses for international students in China should be strict, and the depth of mining should be deep in designing different content for different learners and highlighting individual learning. Unfortunately, more than 40 online courses for international students in China find that most courses are entirely scripted and mechanically copied onto the screen. Content has no animation, audio, video, or other modes to build meaning and timeliness. Teachers in the design-online Open Curriculum have become the online course. Contrary to the construction of an online curriculum, the multi-modal means should be flexible. In addition, the selection of topics for online courses should be based on the principles that combine the advantages of their institutions, and regional development needs to actively condense the characteristics of large-scale homogeneity to avoid competition (Zhong & Zhao, 2020).
3.3. To Grasp the Interactivity, Enjoyable to be Strong
The ancients said, “teach people to have no interest in opinion, will not be happy to learn”, a strong interest can arouse a strong motivation to learn. Many courses for international students in China are practical and interested in language conversion, so the online open courses should grasp this characteristic and make the courses enjoyable and meaningful. The author is responsible for constructing the “general situation of Chinese culture” as the theoretical knowledge and knowledge of interest throughout the curriculum, striving to lose interest but professional, fun, and depth.
In video teaching, teachers should follow the principle of “stimulating learning motivation is also a part of teaching”, using humorous, vivid language, flexible teaching skills, visual performance, and infectious passion for maximizing the classroom’s vitality. While teaching people to “fish” simultaneously teaches people to “desire”, stimulates the study interest and interactive desire of international students in China, and forms an excellent interactive situation between teachers and students.
3.4. To Grasp Multi-Modality and have Some New Designs
In online open courses, most courses are based on a textbook course using video resources for teaching. One of the most significant features is to make multi-modal breaks possible, and it can quickly construct meaning and spread information through text, graphics, pictures, colors, animation, audio, video, and other modes. Teachers in the design and development of this monotonous bilingual text integrate graphics, pictures, colors, animation, video, and other modes of the process of teaching. In line with the three-dimensional, multi-dimensional, dynamic dissemination of knowledge on the network, Vivid teaching courseware can highlight the advantages of technology leading learning can significantly improve students’ interest in learning, improving the quality of teaching. Keep up with the pace of the times and stick to “learning” as the center.
3.5. To Create a Good Online Course Environment to Help Teachers’ Development
With the advent of the big data era, education and teaching in colleges and universities have undergone tremendous changes. These changes are mainly reflected in the educational environment, resources, and teaching methods (Chen & Ma, 2019) [5]. Online teaching during the epidemic period separated the teaching activities of teachers and students in time and space. The teaching environment is no longer the school classroom. The educational resources are not only from the teaching material. Teachers and students teach in a “big data” environment. In this new teaching environment, teachers and students cannot be as interactive as in a face-to-face class, and teachers can not be in the face-to-face class as the Constant supervision. Plus, the epidemic period of teaching activities may also be asynchronous for students worldwide. Under such circumstances, to guarantee the teaching effect and achieve the goal of cultivating high-level professional talents, teachers must change the traditional teaching idea and abandon the teaching mode of mechanically inculcating theories and skills, constructing the inverted classroom model from “teaching-centered” to “learning-centered” transition.
Teachers should take the initiative from the professional knowledge and the transmission of the instructor to the classroom. Let students learn from the professional receiver, absorbers and followers become the professional activities of the participants, explorers, and innovators. Only in this way can the students around the classroom become dominant and enhance the ability of students to learn independently to promote personality development.
In addition, in the era of artificial intelligence, teachers are no longer the porters of knowledge but the creators of knowledge. The primary function is no longer imparting intricate knowledge but building soft knowledge. Because “most of the knowledge transmission in the intelligent robots, their learning, can do intelligent age ability and memory capacity is far beyond human”. The essential task of human beings is innovation and creation. Only the knowledge needed in innovation and creation is what human beings should study and master (Wang, 2018) [6]. As far as the teaching of international students in China during the epidemic period is concerned, teachers’ work is to combine the interactive teaching of online course design and do an excellent job of guidance, inspiration, solution, demonstration, and coordination. This paper probes into the problem countered by international students in their professional study and puts forward some appropriate solutions.
There is no denying that A.I. has replaced today’s low-end jobs. The “learning-centered” teaching in the age of wisdom should also cultivate students’ ability to acquire knowledge from the vast network system (that is, “searching for business”), cultivate students’ ability to discover knowledge, mine data, analyze, judge, control and edit resources in massive data. Teachers can guide students to use the network to develop the ability to search to develop students’ ability to identify and retrieve information. Sometimes, teachers can also use online bilingual news, audio, and video. Moreover, digital resources are provided by various publishing houses to carry out online teaching, which links professional learning to daily life and can also achieve the effect of ideological and political education.
In short, during the epidemic, teachers should grasp the characteristics of the times, adhere to the “student-centered” approach, and use new resources, new methods, and new models to carry out teaching. Online courses would help cultivate students’ ability to search for a business, acquire knowledge and self-management, improve the quality of professional talents, and solve the problem of “great talents are hard to find, and small talents are crowded” in the translation matching market.
3.6. To Use Online Courses to Deepen Blended Learning
After constructing online open courses, it is necessary to use online and offline mixed teaching modes to apply them to teaching efficiently, to carry out the blended teaching of foreign. In China, students’ courses require teachers to design the teaching process carefully and form a close connection and deep interaction between inside and outside classes (Fan, 2019) [7]. So, teachers should first be familiar with the teaching content, objectives, and critical difficulties of the online open courses, and then based on the online courses, set up interrelated, before and after the link of the offline teaching and learning tasks. Through the circulation and mutual promotion of online and offline learning, integration of the communication and interaction between teachers, students, and students, the deep learning field of online courses and rollover classrooms is formed (Luo, 2018) [8].
During the epidemic period, teachers adopted online synchronous teaching instead of traditional offline class and mixed teaching. The effect could be achieved by “asynchronous MOOC teaching + synchronous teacher teaching”. Teachers can assign pre-class tasks according to the needs of the teaching objectives. Pre-class tasks can be a phenomenon in life, problems, preparatory materials, and social hot spots. The goal is to warm up the classroom and prepare students for the relevant knowledge. In the online self-study phase, teachers choose the existing high-quality online open courses according to the teaching content or self-made video courses (or micro-course) uploaded to the platform for students to self-study. The main content of the online course can be explained by professional knowledge and so on. In the synchronous teaching phase, teachers rely on Q.Q. Screen sharing, Tencent the conference, nail, Learning Tong, rain class, and other software, the content of the course is expanded using video broadcasting, audio Broadcasting, or text interaction subject discussion, students demonstrated and answered questions. Through the deep interaction between teachers and students, we can achieve the goal of experiential learning, blended learning, and individualized learning. In this process, teachers are not only the imitators of knowledge but also the initiators of professional problems, the coordinators of classes, and the Companions of students. The student also becomes the classroom participant-the in question inquiry. In the after-class stage, teachers should arrange appropriate exercises according to the characteristics of the chapters so that students can “learn by doing”, consolidate the teaching content, experience the process, and achieve the teaching objectives.
3.7. To Promote Peer Review and Strengthening Supervision of Academic Performance
At the 2018 National Education Conference, Xi Jinping stressed the need to deepen the reform of the education system and reverse the unscientific orientation of education evaluation. For blended learning, especially online learning, Teachers and students are separated in time and space during the pandemic. How to supervise learning is always a thorny problem. But with “big data”, learning.
With the application of sentiment tracking technology, teaching evaluation is gradually transforming into accompanying digital evaluation, which is increasingly manifested as Data-oriented, tracking the whole process of teaching, oriented to the overall development of students’ “accompanying ‘orientation” (Wang Xiaogen, Shan Biying, 2020: 60) [9]. Teachers are offering open online courses to students for professional teaching during the epidemic. Independent learning cannot be left alone, but to design learning tasks carefully, clear learning time axis, grasp dynamic learning Learn about data flow, and do guide self-study. At the same time, in the stage of online teaching, teachers should adhere to the principle of “teachers are the concept of the source of interaction, students are the subject of interaction” through the check-in, answer, bullet screen, message, comment. To carry out the process assessment by voting, word cloud, and test, teachers should increase the proportion of the usual score and stimulate the participation of students in class.
Moreover, enthusiastic about forming helps teachers to build a more comprehensive, objective, multi-perspective dynamic accompanying evaluation. Teachers can rely on their online teaching platforms (such as learning, rain classroom, etc.) to hold online examinations. The online examination should unify the examination time, reduce the proportion of objective questions, increase the proportion of subjective questions, and adopt objective questions machine. Evaluation, subjective questions “peer evaluation + teacher evaluation” way.
The teaching of international students in China during the epidemic period has the characteristics of emergency and on-the-spot. This mode may be the first online teaching experience for most teachers, where unforeseen problems and challenges can arise. Therefore, it is essential to carry out the teaching and research activities and summarize and solve the teaching problems. Due to the limitation of time and space, traditional teaching and research activities could not be carried out in face-to-face physical form during the epidemic. Teachers can set up a “virtual teaching, and research room” based on a network platform, expand teaching and research space and share teaching and research resources.
“Virtual teaching and research office” can invite experts-famous teachers to join and form a positive interaction between experts and teachers, teachers and teachers through QQ. Teaching and research groups, UC Chat Room, and other platforms let teachers from the task of teaching research to the interest of teaching research transformation to create unique.
4. Conclusions
During the outbreak of COVID-19, teachers used online open courses to carry out the mixed-curriculum teaching, which practiced the spirit of the ministry of education, “no suspension of classes, no suspension of classes”, but also reduced the impact of the epidemic on the teaching order.
It is also an opportunity to promote the teaching modernization, digitalization, and informatization of international students in China under the human-computer interaction mode in the age of “Internet+”. Online teaching will move from “freshness” to a “new normal”, which will have a long-term impact on the innovation of teaching ideas and methods in colleges and universities.
Currently, the construction of online open courses for international students in China is still at the initial stage, and few courses are to be built. Based on the current situation of the construction of online open courses for international students in China and the concept of OBE, this paper puts forward some countermeasures and suggestions to communicate with teachers. It is hoped that the majority of international students teaching in China and relevant departments will increase their awareness of online open courses and actively participate in the construction of online open courses for international students in China and the development of mixed teaching to improve the teaching level of the international students in China in the post-epidemic period, to lead the teaching with modern technology, to improve the quality of the cultivation of the international students, and to create a new paradigm of teaching practice and reform and innovation for the international students in China in the 5G era.
Funding
This study was funded by grants from the 2020 Research Project on Education Management of International Students in Zhejiang Province.