The 8th Confucius Institute Conference was held in Beijing's China National Convention Centre on Dec. 7 & 8, 2013. With “Reviewing the Past, Looking to the Future” as its theme, the conference adopted a practical method of case study utilizing dissection and analysis, hoping to provide a platform of experience sharing and information exchange for various Confucius Institutes all around the world. The conference also intended to introduce MOOC to the Confucius Institute to further promote Chinese language and Chinese culture. More than 2,000 university presidents and representatives of various Confucius Institutes from 120 countries and regions attended the conference.
On November 21-22, the China International Distance Education Conference 2013 took place in Beijing. The conference, whose theme was “Openness, Integration and Innovation – Online Learning Opening the Door to the Age of Lifelong Learning”, focused on the new mode, new strategies and new opportunities for online learning development, and especially discussed new thinking, new methods and new measures of the way that online learning is pushing forward the establishment of a lifelong learning system and the construction of the structures of continuous lifelong learning.
On October 25-26, the 2013 Annual Meeting of Beijing Universities’ Digital Libraries, hosted by the Digital Library Committee of Research Institute of Higher Education Library under the Beijing Society of Higher Education and organized by Peking University Library, was held in Beijing. The theme of this seminar was “The Reform and Innovation of the Digital Library during the Age of Big Data”.
On October 29, 2013, the opening ceremony of the Experimental School of the Open University of China (OUC) was held at its headquarters. Doctor Yang Zhijian, the President of the OUC, inaugurated the OUC Beijing Experimental School, and authorized the Experimental Schools in Taiyuan and Nanhai. The ceremony was hosted by the OUC Vice President Yan Bing.
The opening ceremony for the “Western Yunnan Learning Website” of the Open University of China (OUC) was held in the city of Dali in Yunnan province on November 5, 2013. Vice Minister Lu Xin of the Ministry of Education (MOE) and Vice Governor Shen Peiping of Yunan Province began the ceremony, which was hosted by Director-General Xie Huanzhong of the MOE Department of Development and Planning.
As announced in the document “The decision of awarding 'The Gardener Award for Special Education by Bank of Communications' to 201 comrades including Liu Jianping”(CDPF Office [2013] No.7), issued jointly by the General Office of the China Disabled Persons’ Federation (CDPF) and the General Office of the Ministry of Education (MOE), Qu Wei, Vice President of Shenzhen School for the Disabled of the OUC,
The first International Conference of Learning Cities organized by UNESCO was held in Beijing on October 21th, 2013. Vice Premier of the State Council Liu Yandong addressed the conference at the opening ceremony. 
On October 13, 2013, the opening ceremony of the 9th Lifelong Learning for All Activity Week was held in the Binhai New District of Tianjin, which was hosted by the Department of Vocational and Adult Education of the Ministry of Education (MOE), the Secretariat of the Chinese National Commission for UNESCO, and the China Adult Education Association. The theme of this activity week was “Achieving