In Hunan Province, many college students have been learning about preventing virus transmission on the Hunan Qingma Online platform since the outbreak of the COVID-19 epidemic.
Qingma Online, also known as the Online College for Young Marxists in Hunan Province, was set up by Hunan Radio and TV University (Hunan RTVU) as commissioned by the Communist Youth League of Hunan Province, and began operations in 2015. It is the first online platform of its kind to aim at training excellent college students for the province.
After five years, students from 95 colleges and universities, nearly 90% of those in the province, have studied on the platform. It reaches 110,000 people annually, and has trained over 500,000 altogether.
Why is an online platform teaching ideology and politics attracting so many college students?
Being Student-oriented Ensures Efficient Learning
To make sure the platform meets the needs of college students, Hunan RTVU has undertaken multiple investigations of both domestic and overseas online-teaching platforms, and organised annual seminars to solicit opinions from student representatives in Hunan. Its goal has been to foster virtue in students, and find accessible and effective ways of teaching ideology and politics.
Since college students need access to news in their studies, Hunan Qingma Online has launched a news column, and when it turned out that some students are hindered in their studies by not having a computer, it began to assess the use of a mobile app. This app ended up being developed for Hunan Qingma Online on the basis of a solid understanding of student interests and needs. To address difficulties in the use of the app, the platform developed interactive functions, establishing QQ service groups and opening a hotline, enhancing communications among students and allowing their problems to be solved in a timely manner.
Hunan Qingma Online has now become a powerful platform, with functions that enable users to check news in real time, read more than 100 classic literary masterpieces, gain instruction, be entertained by over 20 films and TV shows, and interact via QQ, a popular app among college students, at any time.
Hunan Qingma Online offers the following courses: Political Theory, Interpretation of Current Political Affairs, Guideline for Team Building, and Cultural Literacy. To ensure their popularity, Hunan RTVU surveys college students every year and uses the results to make adjustments.
As well, the platform keeps up-to-date with politics, and updates its curriculum database in a timely manner to guarantee quality. By the end of 2019, Qingma Online had updated 328 courses, with many new courses proving to be very popular; the maximum number of plays of one course has exceeded 1.4 million.
Themed Activities Give Vitality to Learning
The platform operates on the principles of combining theory with practice and online with offline learning, as well as training students according to their aptitudes. In recent years, it has carefully planned themed activities and helped students combine online learning with offline practice, effectively stimulating their interests. In one such activity, "Looking for red memories, inheriting red genes and narrating red stories”, the platform arranged for more than 2,000 trainees to receive revolutionary education in Yan'an, Zunyi and Jinggangshan, and received over 300 related research reports. What’s more, over 1,200 Qingma students have received training through activities related to innovation, entrepreneurship and assistance in the west of Hunan; they have participated in reform and development there for many years. Finally, the annual online Qingma Knowledge Contest has had over 10,000 college-student participants, while the annual student evaluations have made students aware of the importance of learning. In the 2018-19 academic year, 2,300 students were named “excellent students”.
All-round Design Facilitates Learning
The platform offers both variety and routine, and strives to make "meaningful things interesting" through activities while constantly improving. It has six categories of content: courses, homework, social activities, discussions, participation in learning activities and graduation examinations. It also randomly selects 50 students from an undergraduate university and a junior college to take the offline graduation examinations every year to ensure the validity of online learning.
Making Learning Effective
Since it was officially launched in December 2015, over 400,000 students from 95 colleges and universities in Hunan Province have visited the platform for online training, an annual average of more than 100,000 students. Over 180,000 of these have obtained credits and completed courses. Chen Jianmin, secretary of the Party committee of Hunan RTVU, has said: "Hunan Qingma Online is becoming an important source of instruction in Marxist theory for university students all over the province."
Reprinted by OUC News Network from www.youth.cn