Jingwei Viola Liu
Digital Citizenship Indicator C
Indicator C: Promote and model responsible social interactions related to the use of technology and information.
Artifact:
Using an Online Platform to Support Rural Students
Background Introduction (Case study):
Rural education solution & Online Platform Introduction:
Artifact & Course Description:
Course Title
GDIT 819: Social Justice
Course Description
The objective of this course was to have the student gain a better understanding of how socially just, educational change actually happens, and how it can be implemented in families, schools, and communities. Assigned reading and examples from school districts in the United States allow students to examine the role of organizational, political, psychological, and social processes in the implementation of educational programs and policies.
Project Description
One presentation describes the background, and the second proposes a method of using an online platform for teaching in order to reach rural Chinese students. In the large cities in China, education can be relatively good quality, but rural students face enormous hardship. The class sizes in the rural areas are very large, and the population is impoverished. The educational quality is low, and students are subjected regularly to standardized tests that are given nationally. Rural students have significant challenges even attending school due to physical conditions including terrain and weather.
While many of these issues cannot be addressed easily, providing an online supplemental training platform for rural Chinese students could go a long way toward bridging this inequity. This presentation proposes an online platform using “teaching cells” as the educational unit. The teaching cell approach could be used to supplement online learning in rural Chinese students.
Reflection
I grew up in China, and I am aware of the inequities in the public education system, and how rural students are affected. I also am impressed with all the different online learning capabilities and opportunities to augment learning with online software. Unfortunately, China has not been the beneficiary of this particular change, and most importantly, online tools have not been deployed specifically for supporting rural students and their learning.
The inequity in access to school in China between rural students and urban students is very obvious. In China, the kindergarten enrollment is at age 3, and children enter first grade at ages 5 to 6. Hence, the children aged 3 to 5 are considered is school aged in China. From the data from the 2010 national population census, the total number of school age children is 60 million, with 34 million in the rural area, which is 57%. The proportion of children in the rural area is much larger than the proportion in urban areas.
Even though most students are in the rural areas, there is a shortage of teachers in the rural areas. The ratio of teacher to students in rural areas is about 1 to 30, with one teacher for over twice as many students as in the urban areas. Rural students try to go to boarding schools to pursue a better quality learning environment.
By pioneering this idea in China, I will be promoting the use of technology and information for a socially responsible cause, which is supplementing educational attainment in rural Chinese students. I will be modeling responsible social interactions by partnering with public education classrooms to test learning using an online platform to see if learning in the rural Chinese population can be improved.
Refercenses
Hannum, E. (2011). Examinations and Educational Opportunity in China: Mobility and Bottlenecks for the Rural Poor. Oxford Review of Education, 37(2), 267–305.
Qian, X., & Smyth, R. (2008). Measuring regional inequality of education in China: widening coast–inland gap or widening rural–urban gap? Journal of International Development, 20(2), 132–144. https://doi.org/10.1002/jid.1396