Summary:
The Ministry of Education published a guiding opinion on education and teaching reform for higher education institutions directly under the central government. This covers a total of 114 universities, including China’s most prestigious institutions.

The opinion, which covers the period to 2020 and is aligned with the current Five Year Plan, specifies seven key reforms and aims to improve the level of teaching, innovation and student quality in HEIs.

The seven main tasks are as follows:

1) To further promote the teaching and learning of innovation and entrepreneurship in HEIs
• to improve the curriculum for innovation and entrepreneurship, integrating general and specialised courses with innovative and entrepreneurial content, and reforming teaching methods
• to develop credit accumulation and conversion system to allow students who are involved in entrepreneurial activities to adjust their academic progress, including allowing those who take a break to form a start-up business to retain their student status
• to launch entrepreneurship training for university students and encouraging more engagement in national-level innovation and entrepreneurship contests

2) to consolidate of the status of undergraduate teaching as the foundation of Higher Education
• to increase the teaching activity of professors and associate professors (senior faculty and academic fellows); setting undergraduate teaching as a basic condition for professorial appointments; encouraging top academics to teach first year undergraduates
• to establish teaching faculty / teacher development centres, which will deliver training for university academics, handle teaching consulting services, and conduct research on teaching reform and assessment of teaching quality, aiming at capacity building of pedagogy and professional teaching skills; to pilot and demonstrate national-level teacher development centres as best practices in teaching and learning

3) to adjust and optimise the structure of academic disciplines
• to develop a higher education discipline development plan to meet the economic and social development needs
• to optimise structure of academic disciplines, and actively set up disciplines and professional fields closely relevant to strategic emerging industries such as the internet or advanced manufacturing, and to the demands of economic and social development and people's livelihood improvement;
• to focus educational resources on key industrial sectors to better serve national and regional leading industries, and to upgrade traditional subjects and disciplines with new theories, new knowledge and new technology

4) to improve cooperative mechanisms for education and training
• to promote personnel training to meet social needs;
• to improve cooperative actions among government departments, research institutes and relevant industry sectors to jointly promote the whole process of higher education
• to strengthen two-way communication channels between university faculties and specialists in strategic industry sectors
• to jointly construct and share education/training bases with industry sectors and companies, to openly share the experimental teaching platforms with other colleges and universities

5) to promote deep integration of information technology into education and teaching
• Universities with strengths in featured disciplines and modern educational technologies shall develop a number of quality online open courses (e.g. MOOC - massive open online courses)
• to innovate application and sharing models of online courses, to customise small-scale online courses applications for different types of HEIs, to develop blended learning models with online and offline teaching, to change into student-centred teaching and learning methods
• to include teaching development and application of online courses into faculty’s teaching workload, to integrate well-organised online courses into student credit systems, and to evaluate the quality of the (online) curriculum and learning outcomes
• to make full use of information technology to achieve open sharing of high-quality experimental teaching resources

6) to establish and improve institutional mechanisms for prominent talent development
• to strengthen the young talents of fundamental subjects/majors in high-level research universities, in continued implementation of the "pilot project for top-notch students development" in five fundamental subjects as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biological sciences and computer science

7) to serve Higher Education development in Western China
• to continue the policy of "counterpart support” between HEIs in developed regions and those in western China
• to strengthen capacity building of teaching staff and senior administrators of HEIs

Analysis by Kevin Prest and Xiaoxiao Liu:
The Opinion is an action plan which gives more details on university reforms mentioned in the 13th Five Year Plan. The key elements of this Opinion, such as the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship, industry links or western China, are in line with this plan.

Several key areas, however, are given less attention in the overall Five Year Plan and could be relevant for UK institutions. In particular, there is an increased focus on teaching – including encouragement for senior academics to be involved in more undergraduate teaching, while there is more attention paid to the developing training for teaching staff. This may suggest that there might be more opportunities for cooperation in this field.

Although the recent document only applies to national-level universities, it is common for successful reforms at this level to be copied in provincial- and city-level universities.

Sources:
1. http://www.jyb.cn/high/gdjyxw/201607/t20160719_666080.html
2. http://www.moe.gov.cn/srcsite/A08/s7056/201607/t20160718_272133.html?suk...