After discussing the historical background for Chinese higher education since 1949, I now come to how the actual Top Level Courses Project was created in 2003. I will explain the factors that I believe led to the creation, and will also describe the project as it exists today, and as it has developed during the [...]

In 1993, the Ministry of Education released the “Outline for Reform and Development of Education”, which focused on building up approximately 100 key universities and a number of key disciplines. Project 211, which was mentioned in this plan, was launched through the project “Reform Plan of Teaching Contents and Curriculum of Higher Education Facing the [...]

I met Martin Aasbrenn, a Norwegian doctor and medical educator, through Twitter. Since then, we’ve had a number of interesting discussions about the production and use of Open Educational Resources online, and we had a chance to meet up last summer to continue these conversations. I always think I am busy myself, but here is [...]

Since the beginning of formal course evaluations in 1985 with the appraisal of engineering education, systems of quality assurance developed rapidly. Evaluation and recognition of excellence among courses were used to foster competition and reform of curriculum and teaching approaches (HEEC 2010). One of the two universities I visited during my research, University B, is [...]

Having reviewed how modern Chinese higher education began as an import from the Soviet Union, with very centralized and rigid curricula and no local autonomy, we now come to a watershed. Universities are gradually given more power to modify the curricula, and at exactly the same time, systematic course evaluation systems are introduced. I later [...]

In discussing the reestablishment of the university system after the Cultural Revolution, Pepper (1990, 131) believes it was essentially a continuation of the pre-Cultural Revolution model from the 1960s: In all other respects, the university system that was reestablished between 1977 and 1980 essentially replicated the antebellum model of the 1960s, which was essentially the [...]

From the Great Leap Forward to 1977 The Great Leap Forward began in 1958, and aimed to make China much more self-reliant and able to rapidly catch up to the developed world. During this period, there was wide-spread experimentation in the Chinese education sector, with more focus on grassroots education and indigenous knowledge (for example [...]

In my thesis, I spend a lot of time discussing the history of higher education in China since the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 until today, especially focusing on the process of course development, and the development of course evaluation systems. I will show how China began implementing a very rigid [...]