Jill Slay, Flexible Learning Centre, University of South Australia, The Levels Campus, Mawson Lakes, SA 5095, Australia. jill.slay@unisa.edu.au
Australia, China, Cross-cultural, Online Learning Environment, Higher Education.
This paper, the result of 2 months collaboration in teaching and research at the Shandong Institute of Architecture and Engineering, gives a joint Chinese/Western perspective on the current role of the Internet in Chinese Higher Education. It gives, from a Chinese perspective, an overview of the current development of the Internet in China and gives some examples of its usage in Shandong Province. It also provides a Western perspective on the Chinese higher education system and some interpretive tales of Chinese students and their computers. It also examines the changes which will be necessary both in pedagogy and technology, to allow to medium be used to its fullest potential as China develops.
The development of the Internet in China has, until recently, lagged behind that of the West. The earliest campus networks were constructed at Qinghua and Beijing Universities in 1989 (Li 1998) but it was not until 1994 that the Chinese Education and Research Network (CERNET) project was initiated. This project currently has:
Its funding model moved from government-funded to self-funding by the universities in 1997. Important projects in hand are the development of a Chinese search engine, net -compass, teleconferencing tools and virtual libraries. It was planned that during 1998 all 1023 universities in mainland China would be connected to the Internet, with library catalogues, databases and university admissions systems all beginning to come online during this period.
Shandong province is one of the biggest states in China with a population of 80 million people. Its income is dependent both on agriculture and industry. Its IT infrastructure is well developed and the province took part in some early experimental ventures in electronic commerce. The Shandong Institute of Architecture in Jinan joined CERNET in 1985 in the early years of CERNET's development, and WWW and e-mail access has been provided to the college in this way. Recently the government has offered widespread public Internet access to Jinan (the provincial capital city) through its national telephone company's CHINANET. This public access is planned to be available to the whole province by the year 2000.
Major difficulties are experienced with the take-up of both CERNET and CHINANET services. Although there are 50 colleges of Higher Education in Shandong province, only 3-5 of these are actively working with CERNET. The rest are still involved in discussion and research. (It should be noted that networking with Universities is basic when compared to Western norms - an example is of a College with a student population of 6000+ being connected to the Internet by one modem)
In the first three months of CHINANET's activity in Jinan (population 6 million), only 500 people registered to use their service, even though it was free. The major reasons for the lack of interest in these services are firstly the fact that CERNET connections are charged at long-distance rates and CERNET is not subsidised by the Chinese government. This provides greater difficulties for the smaller Universities and Colleges that are funded by the poorer provincial governments rather than the richer national government.
The second reason is that many users are not attracted to the WWW because there is very little Chinese language content. In fact,90% of users surveyed in recent research carried out by Professor Gu Yi Zhong at the Shandong Institute of Architecture and Engineering, solely use e-mail and no other form of Internet protocol such as http (ie. web pages) or ftp. They mainly use e-mail for the purpose of communicating with overseas colleagues or businesses. There is little acceptance among users for what is seen as foreign, and hard-to-translate, content.
The third reason is that the technology involved with the Internet is difficult for users both inside and outside of the University to deal with. Many find it impossible to use or install, given their lack of background in modern (ie Windows) software and hardware.
The higher education system in China, and other parts of Asia, is still very different from that in the West in many respects. Underlying the teaching framework of many modern East Asian countries, such as Korea and Taiwan as well as the People's Republic of China, is a basic Confucian perspective. This is exemplified as follows. It has been said (Hong, 1991) that "respect for the elderly and books.. is the central idea of Chinese education." He also states that this ".. also means respect for authority, classics and experience". This tends to lead to principles that include "striving for perfection that causes reflective cognition style." Caution and modesty are also described as virtues in the classroom. Hong also states that methodologies used to achieve learning traditionally include "copying, repeating, reciting and memorising" with "strict training in basics" as necessary approach. So learning outcomes of the teaching process include an awareness of moral and ethical values and a good understanding and respect for the body of knowledge of a given discipline.
Western education has many models of teaching. And, as has been written elsewhere (Slay, 1997), many of these have been used as an underlying basis for Web-based instruction. These range from social models such as group investigation and personal models such as nondirective teaching through to behavioural models such as simulations and personal control.
Zhang & Collis (1995) identify six teaching models commonly used in China today. These can be stated as follows:
The expectation therefore in China is one of a largely teacher-centred transmission of knowledge and strictly guided "active" learning.
The following three stories are taken from some interpretive tales which I wrote after two separate periods of studying and teaching in China. They draw a picture of the role of the computer on campus in Nanjing Normal University (1995) and in Shandong Institute of Architecture and Engineering (1998) and give some insight into the life of some students and their thoughts and expectations.
I managed to pay a visit to the University Computer department (I was a Computer lecturer myself at the time in Australia). This was a definite culture shock. The computers, 386s and old at the time, were kept in a special air-conditioned and carpeted room. People wore white coats and slippers if they wanted to use them. Most students (and only the best study computers) were doing basic Basic programming. I tried to investigate whether they used Windows, or anything modern, but the lecturer was only interested in the length of computer courses in Australia. There seemed to me to be no parallels in our courses at all. The students seemed only to learn Basic programming {I wondered what job this would qualify them for!] . It seemed to that things like word processing [the Chinese have a special keyboard and it takes 5 keys together to create one character] were a matter for female secretaries and did not enter the arena of the university. I tried to explain the issue of the 'computer as a tool' but I could see that the body language was saying 'Crazy Westerner!' when I tried to put across the concept of teaching less-able, or even all students, to use computers. Computers are for the young and highly intelligent in China.
It was surprised to find the computer was still as remote as ever from the everyday life of the average student. Computers, 486s by now, still lived in splendid isolation in carpeted rooms, and students still wore special slippers to use them. Still no Windows and still basic Basic.
I had imagined that the cutting edge of technology would be a little different to that which we had at home. I was a little surprised though to find out the process which I had inadvertently become involved with. I worked for six weeks with some highly creative young teachers to try and develop an intranet from an old CAD classroom (486s with no hard disks), one modern Pentium in a building several hundred metres away, one modem and a collection of legal and not-so-legal software. The Internet Centre turned out to be a heavily guarded room about the size of an average Western kitchen with a little row of computers along one wall, filled with a large collection of discarded technology and useful pieces of wire.
Major problems for the Chinese academics was their lack of ability in reading English as the 'install' dialogue boxes sped past on the screen. The problem for me was that I read Chinese much more slowly than they could read English. All the online-help in the world did not help us, installation was a slow process! We often laughed at the problems because we were all engineers and computer scientists. Not really the type of people who are famed for their linguistic abilities, but the monopoly of the Internet by the English language is certainly a problem in China.
I left before the networking was done. I did manage to complete a bilingual virtual library and an English home page for the Institute (with the help of some young teachers) and to teach a couple of them to use FrontPage. I gave lectures to many of the final year students and their teachers. Certainly no lack of enthusiasm here - just a lack of technology and English teachers!
I met many delightful students. Scores of them very willingly let me interview them to allow me to complete some research on the effects of culture on students understanding of scientific concepts. I spent hours talking to them, going out to parks to have my photo taken and speaking English to people who, although they had a 7000 word English vocabulary gained over seven years, had never spoken to a Western person before. I was recruited to run a twice-weekly English language club. In China, this sort of informal language class is called an 'English corner'. So I became the third official member of the 'Little Red Hat English Corner' and have the hat to prove it.
Little Red Hat meetings were strange. The first one was arranged for my first Tuesday evening in Jinan. I was escorted to the class by the two founder members, Yan and Jie, who became good friends. .We climbed the stairs to a 3rd floor classroom at 7.00 p.m. in the dim light of some dusty neon tubes. As we walked along the empty corridors the smell of toilets, pervading the dusty night atmosphere, wafted in front of our noses. I entered what I presumed would be a traditional classroom with student arranged before me in rows and found a candle-lit room with the chairs creatively around. In front of each chair, strategically placed on a desk that had been arranged in a casual fashion, was a plastic cup of jasmine tea. I could recognise my place, however, because there was one place that had two cups, one of tea and one of coffee. I recognised the honour in the underlying metaphor, the coffee was a sign of recognition, an acknowledgment of my westerness.
(When I saw the coffee close-up, I squirmed inwardly. I knew I would have to drink it, there was no way I could avoid it, but this was an example of the local Chinese coffee, grown on Hainan Island, way down south. However long it is percolated or filtered, there never seems to be any method of removing all the grounds. They seem to settle in the mouth and on back of the tongue whenever you drink it, and they take a long time to remove. This too could be a Chinese metaphor about western influence. However long you percolate or filter out the western influence, the 'grounds' of it still remain.)
There were something like 100 students in the room, and I was overwhelmed to think that I was the first native speaker who some of them had seen, let alone talked to. I found that Yan and Jie had arranged a program of set speeches to which I had to respond. I wanted to listen to the students all the evening, because they had obviously picked their stars to perform on the first night. The highlight of the evening to me was Sheng Bo, a very traditional boy. He had the softest roundest face I had ever seen, and sang Edelweiss for me in the highest male voice imaginable. I had not imagined that I would be required to sing, and actually refused. I talked about computers and the West because I had not actually known what else to prepare for the evening.
I decided immediately that I would restructure the program if I were going to find myself acting as an informal English teacher (I had actually come to do research in the use of the Internet in higher education!). I felt the most important exercise would have to be practice in speaking the language, and learning new vocabulary. I spent the next few weeks talking to them about the things that teenagers really need to know - slang, fast food, boy friends and girlfriends, student life and how to get on with your parents - much more relevant than a rendition of Edelweiss.
Students would stop and talk to me all the time. They just did not seem to be able to really understand what we Westerners are like. Some were surprised that I had not used a gun, that I had children who (usually) obeyed me, that I was married and not contemplating divorce. It seemed to me that this is a generation with a poor understanding of Western society and values, living in a culture which is deeply and firmly rooted in its own history. They seem to learn and understand Western science and desperately want (and deserve to have) the material rewards which can be reaped from it. This is a generation in transition which is considering, if not publicly then privately, which direction to take next and how to make links with the West without taking on the mantle of Western culture.
The combination of a Confucian philosophy and commonly accepted teaching models means that, in universities and colleges, all subjects are taught lecture-style to large groups. Although it is recognised that online teaching requires changes in basic educational practice, these changes have not generally been addressed.
While some time is made available for practical computing work on technical degree and diploma courses, this usually consists of BASIC and FORTRAN programming on DOS based 386 to 486 machines in most colleges. The computer is not viewed as a general tool and word processing is not widely available, either in Chinese or English.
The Chinese system has been one that has relied on a national curriculum in all sectors of education and changes in the software and hardware used and taught have not been allowed. During April 1998 (China Daily, 1998) the Ministry of Education announced major adjustments in the University system with corresponding changes to the High School curriculum and schoolbooks, which provide some hope that this issue will be addressed
A national curriculum which has not kept pace with changes computing practice in Chinese industry and commerce, and even the home, has caused a demand for Western computer manuals in Chinese translation and the increase in number of private providers offering training in modern computer applications and the Internet. Many young teachers and their students are becoming competent users of modern software (eg Windows 98/NT, Office97, object-oriented software) which is not available within the Higher Educational system by turning to these private providers. This leads to disaffection and difficulties for both teachers and their students.
As well as the obvious improvements to connections, access speeds and call charges which are currently being made by CERNET, wider issues to be faced are the development of Chinese language software and WWW pages to improve the take-up of the Internet in China as a whole. This is being carried out in an environment of large-scale educational reform which will need to take into account the effect of the Internet on accepted Chinese teaching practice and pedagogy.
It is hard to imagine that, even within the next ten years, the Chinese economy might begin to develop and maintain a systemic hardware and software infrastructure within higher education. While it is easy to envisage the limited availability of the Internet for research students, and especially in the nationally funded universities and those around Beijing, the provincial lecturer has the doubly difficult task of persuading the older and therefore more powerful academics to accept new technology and to make drastic changes to their teaching style to incorporate it.
I have proposed elsewhere (Slay 1998) that an effective conceptual framework for the development of an online learning environment might be one which is based on expected pedagogical outcomes. Therefore one model for China would be to concentrate on the development of online teaching content which would be a resource for guided and collective discovery learning (see above). This might begin with the development of Chinese language link pages to English language resources such as comprehensive virtual libraries and databases.
Academic staff development in technology is both very easy and very difficult. Young Chinese academics are as adept as their Western counterparts in their understanding and use of cutting-edge technology. Their progress is however hampered by their English language skills. This is especially apparent when one is made aware of the lower standards of English language required for technical subjects and the datedness (or nonexistence)of the technical vocabulary taught at university level. This appears to be one of the most pressing problems for the Chinese universities to grapple with and solve.
Hong. P.Z 1991. A Thorny Journey - A study of the acculturation process of some Chinese ELICOS students in Brisbane, Australia. Griffith University: Brisbane, Australia.
Li X. and Wu J.P. 1996. CERNET Today. Collaboration via the Virtual Orient Express. Second Hong Kong Web Symposium. University of Hong Kong . 1996
Li. X. 1998. The Web in China: Past, Present and Future. WWW7. Brisbane, Australia.
Slay, J., (1998.) Enhancing the learning environment. British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Belfast, August 28th, 1998.
Zhang, J.P., & Collis, B., A Comparison of teaching models in the West and China. At http://www.usq.edu.au/electpubs/e-jist/ping.htm
Jill Slay, © 1999. The author assigns to Southern Cross University and other educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The author also grants a non-exclusive licence to Southern Cross University to publish this document in full on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM and in printed form with the conference papers and for the document to be published on mirrors on the World Wide Web.