Summary

Earlier this month (June 2018) the Higher Education Department of China’s Ministry of Education held a press conference in Chengdu to launch version 2.0 of the Ministry’s “Outstanding Excellence Plan”, which supports the development of undergraduate education at the country’s universities. Compared to the previous strategy, the new plan covers a wider variety of subject areas and will cover more teachers at more institutions.

The new version of the Outstanding Education Plan will expand the number of core subjects covered within the plan to 17, compared to the previous list of mathematics, chemistry, biology and computer science. Newly added fields include eight subjects within the natural sciences as well as others including literature, history, philosophy and economics. The Plan also integrates six field-specific teaching staff development projects including the Outstanding Engineering Education Development Plan, Outstanding Medical Education Development Plan and similarly-named equivalents in Agriculture & Forestry, Law, Journalism and Education.

In addition to expanding the scope, the new plan will expand the volume of previous projects in each field. For example, the previous “Dual 1,000 Plan” under version 1.0 of the Outstanding Legal Talent Education Development Plan, which previously aimed to send 1,000 law professionals to teach part-time in HEIs and 1,000 law lecturers to work part-time in legal practice, has been upgraded to the “10,000 person plan”.

According to Wu Yan, the director of the Department of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education, the newly upgraded plan will aim towards two standards – first meeting the newly-released national standards, which set minimum requirements for disciplines at Chinese HEIs, and then to work towards bringing Chinese lecturers up to international standards.

During the same conference, Wu also discussed the Ministry of Education’s goal to establish 10,000 national-level and 10,000 provincial-level first-class degree courses [modules], including both offline and accredited online courses. At the national level this will include 3,000 national-level first class open online courses and 1,000 experimental virtual reality teaching projects. The aim of this project is to expand access to quality education resources and promote education equality, particularly in central and western parts of China. To support this goal, the MoE will work towards improving the academic credit system at Chinese universities. At the same time, Wu commented that the MoE would also investigate the possibility of Chinese universities offering honorary degrees.

Analysis by Kevin Prest, Senior Analyst, International Education Services

Although there will likely be little direct impact on UK HEIs from this policy, it represents the Chinese government’s continuing drive towards improving the quality of teaching at the country’s universities. In the long term this may have an effect on Chinese students’ demand for overseas education, although in the short term improved teaching quality at the undergraduate level could have a positive effect on demand for UK postgraduate study.

Sources:

1. http://www.chinanews.com/gn/2018/06-22/8544057.shtml (in Chinese)

2. http://www.chinanews.com/gn/2018/06-22/8544314.shtml (in Chinese)