Building Educational Resilience through Online Education: China’s Lessons Learned from the Education Response to the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has exerted a never-before-seen influence on educational systems worldwide. Tightened policies in response to the outbreak and spread of the pandemic led to mass school closures, forcing hundreds of millions of students to study from home. During the pandemic, international organizations such as the World Bank and UNESCO agreed on the need to strengthen the resilience of education systems. These organizations aimed to equip students for continuous learning in the face of major risks by addressing the educational challenges associated with the current pandemic, possible future pandemics, and other social risks (UNESCO 2020; World Bank 2020). Online educational systems and resources are seen as important tools that can shape the resilience of educational systems. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the Chinese government has followed the general policy of “suspending classes without stopping learning” by adopting a large-scale online educational system that serves 200 million students (Zhang et al. 2020). How prepared are Chinese students and teachers for online learning? How well are online education systems functioning? What are the problems encountered? These are the questions addressed by this special issue. We systematically present research from China on students’ and teachers’ experiences of online teaching during the pandemic. As mentioned by the authors of the articles in this special issue, the outbreak of the pandemic, which represented an unexpected disaster and posed unprecedented challenges, allowed for the social experiment of implementing mass online education and shaping educational resilience. This issue’s summary and discussion of the online teaching and learning experiences of Chinese teachers and students can help us understand how to make educational systems more resilient by improving online education systems. The first article is contributed by Daguang Wu and Wen Li from Xiamen University. The authors note that the pandemic has facilitated the first large-scale use of Internet technology for teaching purposes in China’s universities. Their core concerns are identifying online teaching models, measuring teachers’ and students’ preparedness for online education, and evaluating how effectively relevant teaching platforms are used. A research team led by Wu surveyed 13,997 teachers and 256,504 students at 334 colleges and universities in March 2020, at the outset of the pandemic. The core findings of the survey were as follows. First, the surveyed teachers and students both reported that they