When discussing the effects of the Top Level Courses Project with academic affairs officers and members of the evaluation committee, many of their answers reflected the experiences of individual teachers. There was agreement that it had raised the quality of courses, and the awareness of pedagogy and standards. Mr. B0 said that all academic staff who teach now know the national standards for each course, and that this standardized pedagogy has improved the quality of teaching. This goes together with the generally increased focus on quality in teaching, which especially Professor C0, member of the national evaluation committee, emphasized.

However, standardization does not mean a lack of innovation. Indeed according to Mr. B0, teachers that earlier taught in a very traditional fashion, with very little discussion in class, had through the process of applying to the provincial Top Level Courses Project changed their pedagogical ideas, and the design of the class.

Much of this has happened through an increased emphasis on reflection and discussion. As Mr. B0 said, earlier, teachers would all go to their own classrooms, and would never listen to other people’s classes. Now, not only do the course teams enable sharing and reflection around the course material within a small group, but having all the materials published online also enables a larger group to get involved, including the academic affairs office and the peer-review committee.

Due to the process of applying for Top Level Courses, professors have also become more tech savvy, and are using more educational technology in all their courses. Lectures are recorded, so students who did not catch everything, can watch them again after class. Courses have blogs, where teachers can leave homework, and students can communicate with teachers outside of class.

The issue of legacy was also raised, the idea that when old and famous professors pass away, the only thing left is their notes. By recording their lectures and their course material, the Top Level Courses Project means that people can “attend their lectures” even in the future.

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis “The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching” by Stian Håklev, University of Toronto 2010.

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In my previous post, I introduced the course case studies. In this post, I will describe how the professors described the impact of having their course selected as a Top Level Course.

When asked about what had changed after applying for the Top Level Courses designation, most of the answers from professors centered around the process of applying; while some believed that it had led to a significant improvement in quality, others believed that it had not changed very much. Professor B2 was in the first category, saying that these last years they have been continually improving the teaching materials, largely thanks to the impetus given by the Top Level Courses Project. The text book has been turned into a series of text books, and they not only got very good results in last year’s teaching evaluation, they also got first prize in the provincial Educational Achievement competition. Much of this he ascribes to the guidance provided by the Ministry of Education, and the local academic affairs office.

Professor A2 had always taught his course alone, but because one of the criteria for applying to the Top Level Courses project was the formation of a teaching team, he now shares the responsibility with four other teachers, both training young teachers to one day take over, and involving more senior professors, who would otherwise not engage in undergraduate teaching. Other than that, recording lectures has not changed his way of teaching. He recounted that a colleague had asked him whether they should find someone to “polish” the class, because currently professors lecturing use very informal language. He had answered that there would be no point, because the recordings should reflect reality, and they should not make the course too artificial.

Professor B1’s class had always had a teaching team, but she also felt that the project had had a large impact. The most important outcome for her was becoming more aware of the process of course construction, and the goal of course development. Earlier, she believes she did things more randomly and intuitively, without considering why she made certain choices. The process of applying has changed this, and now she is constantly improving the class in a systematic fashion, according to guidelines. She believes this has also had an effect on the development of other courses with which the course team members are involved.

Professor B2’s team had a similar experience. Earlier, they just used whatever teaching material they had, whereas now they continually explore and improve their course. The project has provided motivation for them to improve, and has also brought the teachers involved with the course closer together. They have introduced several innovations into the teaching of the course, for example allocating an entire day for experiments, and letting students set up and prepare everything themselves, rather than preparing everything in advance. This shift to more inquiry-based learning, which focuses on student initiative, is more effective at making students understand the excitement of research and conducting experiments.

The existence of a large body of open resources has also changed the way Professor B2’s team teaches in other ways, by making the team think of new ways of doing things. Simply following the textbook is no longer sufficient, since so many high quality resources are available that cover the basic material. This year, they organized a class where a number of colleagues each taught one session of their most excellent material, and it was all recorded. Professor B2 found this way of lecturing more interesting, because you can really bring in the most cutting edge research problems and theories into the classroom, rather than being confined strictly to the textbook.

The only professor who did not feel that applying to the Top Level Courses Project had made a large difference, was Professor A1. Although his course has also seen many innovations and changes in the last few years, he believes that these would have happened even without the project. He says that the team was mainly focused on improving the course, but the department put a large emphasis on the Top Level Courses Project, and wanted people to apply for this honor. He laments that applying took a lot of time, which might have been spent more effectively on improving the course.
In addition to the impact on teaching practices and philosophy that came out of the application process, there were also some tangible outcomes of having courses selected as Top Level Courses, but professors focused much less on this aspect. Several mentioned honor to themselves, and to the institution, as one incentive for applying. There was pride in feeling that their courses now had a national impact, and were used by professors and students elsewhere. The usage of the resources will be discussed in a separate section below.

Being awarded the Top Level Course designation also comes with some funding, from the Ministry of Education, the province and the university. For example, Professor A2 received 100,000 RMB, which was mostly spent on buying cameras and building the website, but there was also a bit left over to fund excursions for his students. Professor B1 spent the money he received on hardware and software for providing the online resources

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis “The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching” by Stian Håklev, University of Toronto 2010.

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In my previous post, I introduced the course case studies. In this post, I will describe their experiences with applying for the Top Level Courses designation.

Both Professor B1 and Professor A2 were relatively early in applying for the Top Level Course designation. In both cases, they realized that their existing material was a very good fit for this new program. Professor A2’s school began applying for courses in 2004, and when they asked who had courses that could fit, he volunteered, because he knew that the existing resources they had developed would be very appropriate for the Top Level Course requirements. He also believed that it would be an honor to receive the designation.

Professor B1’s story is similar, she applied for the university-level designation in 2005, and in 2008 her team applied for the national level designation. She says that they never applied for the designation excellent course because they wanted the recognition, but because they thought that through the process of applying they could provide a better course for the students. When the Top Level Courses guidelines came out, they realized that they were even more detailed and stringent than the university’s own excellent courses, so they decided to use the application to improve their course further. They also benefitted from help from the school of online education in creating the website. Although she said that getting the designation was not very important for her herself, she does mention that universities now take Top Level Courses into consideration when assessing professors for promotion.

Professor B2 also applied for the designation in 2005, but Professor A1 did not apply until 2008, five years after the Top Level Courses project had been launched. She said she knew about it the whole time, but thought that as long as others knew she had a good course, that would be sufficient, and did not consider applying for this designation. In 2008, her department began to put more focus on developing Top Level Courses, as part of a process of becoming an international first class university, and expand its influence. At that point, she decided to submit her own course for consideration. An added factor was that a new textbook, which she had developed, had won a national Top Level Courses price for teaching materials the year before, as well as the innovative adding of an internship to the course design.

Both Professor A1 and Professor B1 also mentioned planning for their legacy as factors in the decision to apply for the Top Level Courses project. Professor A1 retired in 2008, and had anyway been planning to make recordings and leave behind a memory of his teaching at the university. Professor B1 explains that she will retire in a few years, and needs to find some young professors that she can train to continue the courses. Building up the course teaching team through the Top Level Courses Project can be one way to further this goal.

When applying, many of the professors visited existing Top Level courses for inspiration, as well as getting support from their colleagues. Professor A1 visited other courses by people in his department, to see how they had done it, and the academic affairs office at Professor B1’s university organized for new applicants to learn from people with very good Top Level Courses, both from their own school and from the outside. Both Professors B1 and B2 also visited other courses online, and in fact Professor B2 is involved in the evaluation process for her discipline, and had the chance to visit many campuses and learning from other professors.

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis “The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching” by Stian Håklev, University of Toronto 2010.

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I interviewed five professors at two universities who have had their courses selected as Top Level Courses. Below, I will briefly introduce the courses, and in later posts, I will detail these professors’ experiences with course selection, and the impact of having been selected.

An interesting finding from the interviews was that most courses had been developed for a long time before they applied to, and were selected as Top Level Courses. The macro-history of course evaluations in China that was discussed in the previous chapter is here illustrated through the personal histories of these individual courses, which often had been selected as excellent university courses. Professor B1 began teaching her course in 1991, when it was a voluntary course. Later it became designated as an obligatory course. The teaching team constantly strived to improve the course, applying to have the course recognized as an approved course, and later as an excellent course. Finally, it was even designated as a class directly sponsored by the Ministry of Education (jiaoyubu zhuban ke, 教育部主办课).

Professor B2’s course was started by the same person who set up the department where he teaches, a professor who was very well-known within China. He proudly notes that the textbook written by this professor has been published continually for 50 years, and had a huge national impact. Since he was such a leader in the field, the course is still today marked by his specific approach to the discipline, especially his emphasis on connecting theory to practice. Professor B2 is one of the students trained by him, one of many teachers in this department who are his students, and is proud to continue his heritage through continually developing teaching teams, teaching materials and courses. This course also received the excellent course designation from the university, before they applied to be a Top Level Course.

Both Professor A2, who began teaching in 1997, and Professor A1 have also taught their courses for many years. Professor A1’s course is an important obligatory course in the major, and one of the key courses at the university. During the years of teaching, a lot of emphasis has been put on developing teaching materials and course contents. Until 2007, the course was entirely lecture-based, but since 2007, they changed to include an internship where students can put their knowledge into practice.

Many of the courses had also developed web resources before the Top Level Courses Project. Professor A1’s course did not have an external website, but he had put many course resources on a campus learning management system (open only to registered students). Professor A2’s example is interesting – his course is also open to students from the Western province of Xinjiang, who come to the university as visiting scholars. In 2004-2005, their demand for more online resources after they had returned home provided the initial impetus to create a website, where he slowly began putting up recordings and other material, together with a discussion forum.

Professor B2 began developing a website for her course in 2001, which contained courseware, questions, descriptions of experiments and other teaching materials. Under a provincial program called the 151 Project (151 gongcheng, 151工程), she and her colleagues also developed a resource database, where they deposited a number of resources from the course. They also received requests from other universities for access to the materials, because the textbook mentioned above has been so popular and widely known.

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis “The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching” by Stian Håklev, University of Toronto 2010.

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This section will provide a view of the Top Level Courses Project from the institutional perspective. Based on interviews with professors, administrators, and some published literature and reports, I will first describe some cases for how universities organize the selection of courses.

University-level Top Level Course selection is organized and implemented by individual universities, based on their course development plans and the courses that are traditionally highly ranked internally. From courses that have already developed good materials, have distinguishing features, and can play an inspirational role for other teachers, the university administration will choose a certain number of courses, and invest in their further development.

University B has a long tradition for educational technology, and was one of the first universities to have a course designated as Top Level in 2003. The work on developing Top Level Courses, and the use of this process as a lever to improve the educational quality at the university, continues to have high priority.

The academic affairs office at University B is very concerned with whether courses are well enough constructed, so that they will have a high potential for winning in the provincial and national competitions. Their self-described strength is their “pre-application process”. All 20 departments in the university can propose courses, and these get a small amount of seed money for development. The courses that are selected for this internal process are courses that are already impressive, with many having gone through a period of more than ten years of development. However, they have to be updated, and they especially have to develop online material that reflect well on the course.

The courses are given 1-2 months for development, and after that, they create an expert committee composed of internal and external experts that begin evaluating the courses. The external experts come from other high-ranking universities in the region. This evaluation is based mainly on the available online resources, but a supervisory committee made up of very experienced and retired teachers also goes to listen in on classes, and solicit students’ evaluations of the teaching materials. The task of the academic affairs office is not to get directly involved in evaluation, but rather to coordinate the process.

The internal university committee discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each course, especially where there is a difference in opinion with the external experts, and the best courses are proposed as provincial and national courses. The teachers who have already had a course accepted as a provincial or national Top-Level Course also contribute to share their experiences of the process.

University B has an ambitious goal for developing Top Level Courses, they want 700-800 of their 3000 courses to reach Top Level status, which would represent 30% of courses. Their short-term goal is to get 500 Top Level courses between 2012 and 2015, which should include all obligatory courses. In addition, they are spending considerable energy trying to put up recordings for every single lecture for all their 124 existing Top Level Courses, to complement the requisite representative lectures. This focus on improving existing Top Level Courses is also reflected in their annual monitoring process, where all heads of departments sit around a table, display one course at a time on a projector, and check how much of the course contents has been updated.

When interviewing the person in charge of coordinating the development of Top Level Courses at University A, he put much less focus on the process of quality improvement. “Here the teachers and courses are already very good, so we don’t have to do too much work to improve them.” Mr. A0 believes that professors from University A have strong moral values, and would work hard on improving their courses even without such competitions, but he acknowledged that internal competition between colleagues in the same department can push professors to work harder on improving courses. Similar to the case at University B, most courses entered into the Top Level Courses selection process at University A are courses that have a long history of development as excellent courses, and were not developed specifically for the Top Level Courses Project.

I also quote extensively from a detailed published case study concerning Lanzhou City College.

Wang Xueyin (2008) has published a quite detailed case study from the development of Top Level Courses at Lanzhou City College, and their process has many similarities with the one at University B. After the province put out the call for Top Level Courses applications, the university began by calling a meeting with all the heads of departments, to ask them to identify top courses that had potential to become a Top Level Course. They then established a teaching committee to identify basic and specialized courses that were relevant, and brought the teachers of those courses together with personnel from the computer department to discuss how online teaching materials could be constructed. Like at University B, the school decided to provide some funding to construct the initial courses.

The main guiding philosophy was that the construction of Top Level Courses would support the improvement of quality of all the courses at the school, and ideally the courses that could have the most impact on the entire department would be selected. The university administration also underlined the point that the idea was not to simply recycle existing courses online, but rather to think through the design, and update the teaching methodology and content. When the course development was complete, the university organized an online blind peer-review of the course, and based on this, determined whether to award the university-level Top Level Course designation.

Thus, the universities play a key role in the selection of Top Level Courses:

As we have seen from these three case studies, universities play a key role in the Top Level Courses Project, selecting potential candidates and supporting their development, until they can be selected as a university-level Top Level Course. Universities also have to submit an annual report about the construction and sharing of Top Level Courses, including
updating and keeping the resources available, students’ use and feedback, support from the school, the open sharing situation of the resource, amount of resources spent on developing the course, and how much the university is spending on supporting development economically and organizationally (Liu Zenghui 2009).

Promotion to higher levels

The announcement of university-level Top Level Courses is made public, and anyone can both visit the course website, as well as provide feedback. If there are no strong objections to the course during this period, the decision will be made to suggest the course for a higher level designation (provincial level, and then national level).

The provincial level

The provincial bureau of education is responsible for planning the distribution of provincial level Top Level Courses based on the provincial plan for educational development and course development. Based on this, the provincial bureau of education will ensure the completion of the provincial level project, as well as the suggestion of courses for the national level selection. The courses that enter the provincial level selection process must already have been designated as university-level Top Level courses. The province then organizes an online blind peer-review by subject specialists, based on provincial evaluation criteria, which may differ by province. The courses selected are made public, and awarded the provincial level designation, as well as a sum of money to support the further development of the courses.

The national level is the final step – it has more stringent selection criteria, and a higher reward.

The final step is the national level Top Level Courses, organized by the national Ministry of Education. The Ministry of Education is the highest level organization responsible for the organization and management of the Top Level Courses Project, organizing the selection of different types of courses (undergraduate courses, vocational courses and online courses), providing guidance around the entire process of developing and evaluating courses, and supervising the annual evaluation and selection of courses at all levels. The selection of national level courses is similar to the university-level and provincial level process, however the requirements for each indicator (course quality, course evaluation management, financial support, quality control, etc) are much stricter.

To conclude:

From the description above, we can see that the Top Level Courses are awarded different levels of designations (which to a certain extent reflect their level of maturity). The financial support arrives after the course has already been developed, which means that the university first has to use its own money to invest in course development, before the course can receive additional support when selected to higher levels. This is congruent with the original intent of the project, which was to stimulate universities to invest more in course development.

The three levels in the selection of Top Level Courses follow similar processes, and in practice, to improve the linkages between the three levels, most university-level and provincial level selections employ the same standards as the national selection (Wang Long, personal communications). This also serves to raise the quality of courses at all levels. In addition, since the entire process of development, sharing, and peer-review of courses happens through the Internet, the educational technology demands are quite high. The focus on digitization of resources, teaching and learning in online settings, communication between students and teachers, generative assessments, etc., all help promoting the integration of information technology and teaching and learning in higher education.

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis “The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching” by Stian Håklev, University of Toronto 2010.

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Open Access Week is a great idea – now in its fourth year, it really enables communities to come together across the world to promote the concept of Open Access. Last year, we had a number of very successful events at University of Toronto, I gave a talk about institutional models for OER (video, Mp3, slides), and John Willinsky (video) gave a very moving talk about how he got Stanford University’s School of Education to embrace Open Access.

This year, there was another great slate of events, and I was involved in a number of them. One of the talks I gave was about “What it means to be an open scholar”. I gave three versions of this talk, a shorter one that was more focused on my own experiments, and ideas for others to try, at UT Scarborough, and a longer one, where I added a section about “future trends in scholarly communications”, at the OISE/UT library. This final talk was video-recorded, and both the synced video+slides, as well as the slides themselves on Slideshare, are available.

This is a new talk that I have never done before, and it was a lot of fun putting it together. Much of my time as an OA advocate is spent trying to get people to deposit their works in T-Space, our institutional repository, and explaining the basics of Open Access, including green and gold OA. I did mention this briefly in the beginning of the talk, but most of my talk was trying to push the boundaries. Because while it’s important to get all of our existing journal articles out there, a huge Web 1.0 database of PDFs isn’t really that exciting.

So I started out with a quote from Academic Evolution, defining an “open scholar”:

The Open Scholar, as I’m defining this person, is not simply someone who agrees to allow free access and reuse of his or her traditional scholarly articles and books; no, the Open Scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it–at any stage of its development.

I started out with T-Space, and showed that people are actually getting to the articles there through some very interesting pathways, including Wikipedia articles. The problem is that there is little or no statistic exposed to the authors, so professors will never know that their article is linked from a Wikipedia article, a blog, or even an undergraduate course syllabus. I think exposing this could create some very excited self-archiving evangelists – people like to be read.

I then discussed some of my own publishing experiments. The first was the translation of my BA thesis into Indonesian, based on my an early blog post where I speculated about creating a “fair trade logo” for academic research, of which one of the requirements would be to make your research available in the language of the people you researched.  I showed some interesting statistics, showing that the vast majority of people who had downloaded the thesis, had been from Indonesia.

I then discussed my ongoing efforts at sharing my MA research on the Chinese Top Level Courses Project. I have made the thesis available in many formats, including ePub, and I’m in the process of blogging the thesis right here.

I used another quote by Academic Evolution to talk about sharing not only the final polished output of your research, but also the many artifacts that are generated during the research:

The current Open Access model is provisioning for legacy genres and formats of scholarly communication. That’s great for archival purposes, but this is not the next real destination for scholarly discourse. Why? Because consequential intellectual work takes place in myriad ways outside of traditional scholarly genres, that’s why, and the digital realm is ready to capture, organize, value, and disseminate those other ways of generating knowledge.

I gave as example a Wikipedia article I’ve written about OpenCourseWare in Japan. This is based on material from my thesis, but it’s not the main topic of the thesis – people interested in information about this would probably not download my entire thesis, but this way they can easily find it on Wikipedia – I even had citations, which Wikipedia loves.

I then talked about opening up the research process, giving a number of examples of Open Notebook Science, and mentioning the concept of distributed citizen science projects, for example the Wikiversity Bloom Clock project. As an example of somebody who has really opened up their PhD research process, I showed Cormac’s PhD wiki, where he has put up all his research notes, including detailed notes from meetings with his supervisor. I noted that these kinds of attempts at opening up the process of research are not only useful to other people in the field, but can be a great resource for students who are curious about the scientific process.

I made the case for having an online profile, for example my page listing all my publications and presentations, and also made the point that I feel that I understand much better the research trajectories and “big ideas” of some open scholars that I have never even met physically, compared to some of the researchers in my own institutions who I see every day (I explored this further in this blog post). I also talked about my use of Slideshare and Twitter.

For the future of scholarly publishing (here my the formatting of my slides got mangled), I picked out a few key trends. I posited that we will need to recognize new forms of scholarship in the future, one of these could be curation, of which I think the blog Sociological Images is a great example. I discussed the shift from journal metrics to article metrics, and used PLoS One as an example. I mentioned experiments with open peer review, the idea of journal disaggregation, and in talking about getting away from PDFs, cited some of Anita De Waard‘s work on semantic markup. Finally, I used the Guardian datablog as an example of linked data, both sharing more data in usable formats, and linking these directly to the journal articles.

Putting together the presentation was a lot of fun, and I have been inspired by so many in the Open Access field. I got lot’s of inspiration from my participation at ElPub 2009 and OAI6, as well as lots of great OA bloggers and open activists in general.

Stian

The Top Level Courses Project’s official title was “Project for the quality of teaching and reform of teaching in institutions of higher education, work on the construction of Top Level courses”, and was always meant to be a part of a larger project for enhancing quality and reforming teaching in higher education. In 2007, the State Council, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Finance officially launched the three year “Project for Reform of Teaching and Improvement of Teaching Quality in Institutions of Higher Education”, usually referred to as the Quality Project (zhiliang gongcheng, 质量工程). The project launch had been preceded by more than a year of investigation, research and open meetings with stakeholders (Li Bin 2007).

This project targeted 1000 universities with 10 million full-time students, and was to cost approximately USD $365 million. The targets were as follows: Help 3000 professors and administrators to develop peer training exchanges, select 1000 national-level teaching teams, give awards to 500 top national teachers, develop 500 experimental teaching centers, 500 individual talent development and creativity areas, and 500 high quality bilingual classes (Jingpinke 2010). In addition, the project would restructure majors, publish teaching evaluations and data on teaching and learning, promote mutual assistance between universities in Eastern China and universities in Western China, and promote self-study, learning through research, and practical learning to improve initiative and creativity among students (Wen 2007).

As for the Top Level Courses Project, the first stage from 2003 to 2007 had produced 1,500 national Top Level courses, with the focus on commonly taught basic undergraduate courses. The second stage, beginning in 2007, had a target of constructing 3,000 national level Top Level courses. That year, the Ministry of Education also expanded the project to include online courses, and during the next three years of operation, evaluated 149 national level online Top Level courses. After this expansion, including online courses, and also courses from public security and military schools, the project covered a total of 700 institutions of higher education in every part of China. From 2003 to 2010, 3790 national level courses have been produced, including 2528 undergraduate courses, 1037 vocational courses and 209 online courses. In addition to the national level courses, more than 6000 provincial level courses, and a large number of university-level courses have been produced (NTCP 2010).

In addition, the 2007 stage called for the creation of an organized system for sharing the course materials generated, and supporting the development of software and portals that could facilitate this sharing (Wang Xueyin 2008). This would later become the Jingpinke.com portal, which will be discussed in a separate section.

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis “The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching” by Stian Håklev, University of Toronto 2010.

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As the Ministry of Education has gained experience, there have been continuous changes from year to year of the evaluation criteria for Top Level Courses. These range from minor variations in the rating rubrics used, to more large-scale changes in priorities. The actual rubric used to evaluate courses has five comprehensive indicators: teaching teams, teaching content, teaching conditions, teaching methods and practice, and instructional outcome. These five are subdivided into 15 secondary indicators (one was removed in 2008) as listed by Wang Peng (2008):

• teaching team, including responsible person and main lecturer
• the composition and quality of teaching team
• educational reform and educational research
• the course content
• the organization and planning of the course content
• the practical components (removed in 2008)
• teaching materials and other resources
• conditions for practical components
• online teaching environment
• instructional design
• instructional approach
• instructional practice
• instructional outcomes – evaluation by peers, by university supervisor,
• student evaluations
• evaluation of recorded materials

When it comes to large scale changes in focus, Professor B3 commented that initially the online resources were not that important, because the Internet was not very developed at the time that the Top Level Courses Project started. As the web grew in importance and sophistication this changed, and in 2004 and 2005, requirements about the functionality and design of the course website increased.

Likewise, Mr. B0 stated that the provinces and the Ministry of Education have focused increasingly on the sharing of resources and providing a service to others. This is a marked change from the first few years, when the application process was the main focus. Initially there were not many courses, and attracting a number of high-quality courses was the focus. Later, as the number of courses increased, it became important to offer better access to these resources, which led to the creation of the Jingpinke.com portal (see the later section on this).

Wang Peng (2008) who studied how the evaluation criteria had changed from 2003-2008, also identified a number of trends. He reaffirmed the added focus on instructional design, pedagogy, use of technology, impact and sharing, and the building of local teams. When evaluating the changes, it is often more interesting to look at the explanations given for the different criteria, than the weight assigned. For example, the explanation for the criteria “evaluation of recorded materials” changed from specifying “dignified bearing, clear sound, full of teaching enthusiasm, lively class atmosphere, high student participation rate, and effective student-teacher interaction” in 2003 to asking for “influential teaching which attracts students attention, enlightens and inspires thinking, association and creativity” in 2004 (ibid. 39).

As new categories of courses were added, new rubrics also had to be developed. For example, the evaluation of online courses put more focus on course resources for self-learners, the teaching and learning process, and learning support design. Zeng, Zeng and Fan (2007) believe this to be natural, and mention high student numbers, and a focus on adult learners that need practical and vocationally oriented training as key features distinguishing distance education from teaching programs in traditional universities.

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis “The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching” by Stian Håklev, University of Toronto 2010.

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The initial policy defined a quality course as being a model course with “first-class teaching teams, first-class teaching content, first-class teaching methods, first-class course materials, first class teaching and first-class teaching management” (MoE 2003). These “six first-classes” are mentioned in almost all literature on the project, and were also repeated by most of my interview participants.

The specific aspects listed in the first policy paper specified that the courses should be taught by top teachers, who have long experience and influence in their fields. This was partially to address the desire, also expressed in the 2001 policy paper, to attract full professors at top universities into spending time teaching core undergraduate courses. The content of the course should be up-to-date and reflect the cutting edge of the academic field. The course should be taught with advanced and innovative teaching methods.
Teaching materials should either be award-winning nationally approved materials, materials developed by the teachers themselves, or material from abroad. More experiential and practical learning was encouraged, for example experiments and internships. Finally, the university was to set up effective incentive and evaluation mechanisms for rewarding participation in the project, and effectively selecting and improving appropriate courses.

In 2004, a more detailed policy note appeared, which provided further information about the requirements for courses. Both regular undergraduate courses, and courses from vocational schools, that had already been taught for at least three years, were accepted. The head of the teaching team should be a full professor. To evaluate that person’s teaching capability, a minimum of one 50 minute video recording had to be made available on the website, but universities were encouraged to put up recordings of all lectures. In addition, the syllabus, lesson plans, exercises, laboratory guides, and reference material also had to be made available online (MoE 2004).

In the previous chapter, a number of course evaluation systems that preceded the Top Level Courses project were discussed. One of these, at Tsinghua University, actually gave its name to the Top Level Courses project (Han Xibin and Ju Feng, personal communication). According to Mr. B0, most of the categories listed, such as teaching teams, teaching contents, teaching methods, teaching principles, and the academic level of teachers, were similar to earlier evaluation methods. The most important innovation was the focus on educational technology, ie. developing internet resources and then sharing them openly.

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis “The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching” by Stian Håklev, University of Toronto 2010.

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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 last 7 years, in detail. This will be based on both literature review, and a number of interviews with academics and administrators involved with the production of Top Level Courses. The groundwork for the project was laid in 2001, with a report:

In 2001, the Ministry of Education released a document called “Some ideas about strengthening undergraduate teaching and improving pedagogy in higher education” (MoE 2001). This document laid out the case for an improved focus on teaching, including an increase in financial resources, and encouraging more full professors to teach undergraduate courses. Teaching quality was to be made an important criterion for promotions, young academics were to receive special training in teaching and pedagogy, and more courses were to be taught in English, or a mix of English and Chinese. The final two recommendations are particularly relevant to the Top Level Courses Project: more educational technology was to be applied in education, and the document also called for the establishment and improvement of teaching quality monitoring and assurance systems.

Then, in 2003, the specific project was launched:

In April 2003, the National Top Level Courses Project was formally launched by the Ministry of Education (MoE 2003). It set forth a plan to use the development, selection and publication of Top Level Courses to carry out the goals of the 2001 policy mentioned above, to which it made explicit reference in its justification. The creation and evaluation of these model courses would act as a catalyst and promote the improvement of all courses, raising the general importance of pedagogy and teaching within universities. The policy called for all universities to design a comprehensive plan for how the project would be implemented, to make sure that it raised the quality the teaching at the entire university.

So why did this happen?

The head of the academic affairs office at University B (B0) explained that enrolment in Chinese higher education had begun expanding rapidly from the year 1999, transitioning from elite education to mass higher education. This expansion happened too fast, and there was not sufficient equipment or teachers available. According to Mr. B0, this led to society doubting the quality of instruction. The Top Level Courses Project was designed as a way to make universities and individual professors care more about the quality of instruction.

Professor B3 puts the project into a historical perspective, and shows how it was the natural consequence of a trajectory that had begun with the Ministry of Education first focusing on evaluating the best national universities, and increasing their funding. The second step had been to identify national key disciplines, so that a given university would have educational technology as its key discipline, another economics. These were also peer-reviewed, and implied increased funding, and a responsibility to lead the development of that particular field. However, a discipline is still very broad, so finally the Ministry of Education decided to evaluate individual courses.

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The quotes in this text is from the MA Thesis “The Chinese National Top Level Courses Project: Using Open Educational Resources to Promote Quality in Undergraduate Teaching” by Stian Håklev, University of Toronto 2010.

• Download the canonical PDF version
• Central page collecting all blog posts, many different download formats, and supplementary material

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