Building a digital foundation: a vast expedition to reshape future education

In the past two years, with the rise of big models and the explosion of applications such as ChatGPT and Sora, new technologies represented by artificial intelligence are rapidly changing the pace of global economic and social development. As an important way to cultivate talents, education must also achieve its own innovative transformation while promoting the development of new quality productivity.

The national education digitalization strategic action has entered its third year. At the historical juncture where the scientific and technological revolution and educational reform intersect, the Ministry of Education has made important arrangements for China's education digitalization strategic action, proposing to take "3C" as the basis, "3I" as the guide, adhere to application as the king, and achieve high quality of China's digital education .

The "3I" symbolized by "integration, intelligence, and internationalization" has become another beacon for the development of digital education. In this expedition towards the future, the "digital base" plays an indisputable important role. It is not only the cornerstone of the digital transformation of education, but also a key lever to promote the high-quality development of education, achieve intelligent upgrading and integrated innovation.

So, how do we define "education digital foundation"? Why should we develop a digital foundation? And how should we build a digital foundation? We urgently need clearer answers.

The 83rd China Educational Equipment Exhibition was held at Chongqing International Expo Center a few days ago. During the meeting, Liu Yongqian, a researcher at the Central Audiovisual Education Museum and executive deputy director of the Academic Committee of the China Educational Technology Association, was interviewed by reporters and further explained the above issues.

Understanding the digital foundation: enterprises proposed, governments adopted, and promoted implementation at the grassroots level

Regarding the digital base of education, Liu Yongqian first explained the origin of this concept.

• In 2019, Huawei proposed the term “digital base”;
• In July 2021, the relevant documents issued by six ministries and commissions included the construction goal of "building a dedicated education network and an Internet + education platform to provide a digital foundation for the high-quality development of education";
• In November 2021, the "Shanghai Education Digital Transformation Implementation Plan (2021-2023)" clearly defined the task of "building a digital base for education and enabling the development of various educational applications."

"We can see that (this concept) was first proposed by the enterprises, and the government thought it made sense, adopted it, and then used administrative power to promote its implementation."

Liu Yongqian further pointed out that the so-called digital base can be seen as a synonym for "new infrastructure" in the new development cycle.

After two years of building the national education digitalization strategic action, my country's digital education development level has entered a new stage of development, facing new problems and challenges from partial transformation to comprehensive transformation and even global change.

In Liu Yongqian's view, the reform of Chinese education, especially the impact of Chinese educational informatization on education, must truly play its role in promoting it. " We must not look for it from the technology itself, but from the problems existing in education. Once you find the problem, you will find the place where applied technology can be used. "

Adhering to the concept of "starting from the problem", Liu Yongqian bluntly stated that the reason for building a "digital base" is ultimately because " education informatization must solve its own problems ."

"Information technology provides many ways for school informatization. But objectively, we have to admit that the situation where schools are independent and develop their own systems has not been resolved, which has led to functional fragmentation and differentiated standards ."

"Education information is not interconnected, and systems cannot be used interchangeably. In many cases, you support your system and I support my system, resulting in a mess. There are data islands everywhere, which cannot be compatible with the Internet's "one-stop service", affecting the realization and development of education modernization. In the face of these problems, the digital base has become a new way for us to solve these problems."

To build a digital foundation essentially means to construct an open, shared, technologically integrated, interactive and visual data governance system, so that data between different platforms can be efficiently integrated and shared, forming an integrated digital foundation ecosystem of "Internet of Things, Internet of Numbers, and Internet of Intelligence".

"Just like '3I' stands for 'integration, intelligence and internationalization', we are now proposing new education infrastructure and building a digital foundation, which is a manifestation of integrated thinking. In order to end this chaos of each doing its own thing, we need to move towards integration and achieve a new balance, so that all participants can coexist on a foundation, interconnect and seek development. Only in this way can we promote high-quality education."

Building a digital foundation: respecting market rules and promoting cooperation among government, industry, academia, research and application

Having clarified the importance of the digital base, how should we build a new base? Liu Yongqian gave several suggestions.

First, we must recognize the urgency of time.

In the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Construction of New Education Infrastructure and Building a High-quality Education Support System" issued by six ministries and commissions, it is proposed that "by 2025, a new education infrastructure system with optimized structure, intensive and efficient, safe and reliable will be basically formed, and long-term and comprehensive development will be achieved through iterative upgrades, updates and continuous construction."

"The country is promoting the construction of digital infrastructure in schools, which is to promote the implementation of new education infrastructure in schools. The two statements mean the same thing. The deadline is 2025, which is more urgent."

Second, as a national education digitalization pilot area, Shanghai has taken the lead in building an education digital base, providing experience that can be used as a reference for other regions. However, it is also necessary to adapt to local conditions, and other regions should not blindly copy the model when following up.

Third, the key to promoting the construction of a digital education base lies in practical application. In particular, the central and western regions and rural areas need to combine local economic and social development and specific educational conditions, and creatively adopt practices that conform to local realities to build a digital education base.

"Each region and each school should creatively explore and form new mechanisms and methods based on their own basic conditions. Implementing the digital base in schools does not mean that the school has to take on all the construction and form its own system. The implementation is for application. For schools, the most important thing is that the functions of the digital base are truly realized in their own schools, not whether a certain set of equipment is successfully installed in your school ."

Fourth, we must respect market rules. In the process of building the digital base of education, the government, enterprises, associations and schools each assume different responsibilities and roles.

Liu Yongqian pointed out: "We have the correct policy guidance at present, but it is still far from grounded. To truly implement it, we need cooperation among the government, academia, industry, research and application departments."

In his opinion, in the entire process of building the digital base, the government's responsibility mainly lies in the formulation and promotion of policies, using administrative power to promote the resolution of problems and supervise the construction process; enterprises should work closely with local education departments to create new technical methods and good management methods. It can also form a regional public basic capacity base and provide radioactive services; associations focus on selecting demonstration models, summarizing advanced experiences, and establishing educational digital bases throughout the country; and schools, as the smallest unit of digital base construction, should purchase services based on actual needs, pay attention to feedback in specific practices, and continuously improve and optimize the application of digital bases.

Promoting digital infrastructure: Finding feasible, easy-to-operate and economical solutions

Through long-term observation and practice, Liu Yongqian fully realized the importance of selecting model examples. In order to promote the construction of digital education foundation to county and city schools in the vast central and western regions and truly radiate the whole country, we must face up to the important role played by enterprises in it. Among them, Ruijie Networks' practical experience in Gansu has provided a feasible, easy-to-operate and economical solution for the construction of digital foundations for primary and secondary schools in relatively backward economic regions.

So, how do ICT infrastructure and solution providers such as Ruijie Networks do it? Take the reconstruction of the construction, management and use model of teaching terminals as an example.

Observations show that computing resources widely distributed in schools in various districts and counties are generally underutilized, and the server concurrency rate of most schools is only between 30% and 50%, far from saturation. Based on this reality, Ruijie Networks envisions integrating and migrating these idle computing resources to the cloud to achieve centralized dynamic management and allocation.

First, change the computing power utilization mode from "giving" to "taking". Practical results have proved that this measure effectively promotes balance and realizes the coordination of resources on demand.

Second, it improves the professional service capabilities of the Education Bureau. Traditional PCs have many connectors and are difficult to maintain, and the efficiency of on-site repair is low. Ruijie Networks simplifies the maintenance process through unified management and operation.

Third, scientific decision-making is assisted through a digital management platform. Through the management platform, data is presented from five aspects: teaching, application, assets, utilization, and energy consumption, which improves the overall vision of decision-making in all aspects.

Based on the concept of "one cloud for the whole world", Ruijie Networks has helped schools improve capital utilization and achieve the effect of spending 4 cents for every 1 cent through centralized deployment and hyper-converged cloud computing platform resource pool.

Ruijie Networks' education digitalization pilot in Gansu includes but is not limited to the deployment of cloud desktop projects and the implementation of the "Global One Cloud" project. These initiatives have improved the level of local education informatization and provided a new solution to the problem of insufficient and unbalanced allocation of high-quality education resources.

Final Thoughts

If the youth are wise, the country will be wise; if the youth are strong, the country will be strong. Building a digital education foundation is the key to education reform today and the foundation for tomorrow under the mission of the times. However, this future-oriented systematic project is never a one-night job, but a long-lasting and vast expedition. Now that we are just starting out, only by gathering the wisdom and strength of the people can we write a brilliant chapter on the future of education in this journey.