Building a digital base: a vast expedition to reshape the future of education

In the past two years, with the rise of large models and the explosion of applications such as ChatGPT and Sora, new technologies represented by artificial intelligence are rapidly changing the pace of global economic and social development. As an important way to cultivate talents, education must achieve its own innovation and transformation while promoting the development of new productive forces.

The National Education Digitalization Strategic Action has entered its third year. At the historical juncture where scientific and technological revolution and educational reform are intertwined, the Ministry of Education has made important arrangements for the strategic actions of China's educational digitalization, proposing that it should be based on "3C", guided by "3I", insist on application as king, and realize the digital education in China. high quality .

The "3I" represented by "integration, intelligence, and internationalization" has become another beacon for the development of digital education. In this expedition to the future, the "digital base" is an undisputed important role. It is not only the cornerstone of the digital transformation of education, but also a key lever to help high-quality development of education, realize intelligent upgrading and integrated innovation.

So, how to define "educational digital base"? Why develop digital base? How to build a digital base? We urgently need clearer answers.

Recently, the 83rd China Educational Equipment Exhibition was held at the Chongqing International Expo Center. During the meeting, Liu Yongqian, a researcher at the Central Audio-visual Education Center and executive deputy director of the Academic Committee of the China Educational Technology Association, was interviewed by reporters and further explained the above issues.

Understanding the digital base: proposed by enterprises, adopted by the government, and implemented at the grassroots level

Regarding the educational digital base, Liu Yongqian first explained the origin of this concept.

• In 2019, Huawei proposed the term "digital base";
• In July 2021, the construction goal of "building a dedicated education network and a large Internet + education platform to provide a digital base for the high-quality development of education" appeared in relevant documents issued by six ministries and commissions;
• In November 2021, in the "Shanghai Education Digital Transformation Implementation Plan (2021-2023)", the task of "creating an educational digital base and empowering the development of various educational applications" was clarified.

"It can be seen that (this concept) was first proposed by enterprises, and the government thought it made sense and adopted it, and then used administrative power to promote its implementation."

Liu Yongqian further pointed out that the so-called digital base can be regarded as a pronoun for "new infrastructure" in the new development cycle.

After two years of national education digitalization strategic action construction, my country's digital education development level has begun to enter a new stage of development, facing new problems and challenges from partial transformation to comprehensive transformation and even global transformation.

In Liu Yongqian's view, the reform of China's education, especially the impact of China's education informatization on education, must truly play its role in promoting, " You must not look for it from the technology itself, you must look for it from the problems that exist in education. You find this problem, then you’ve found a place for application technology. ”

Adhering to the concept of "starting from the problem", Liu Yongqian bluntly said that the reason for building a "digital base" is ultimately that " education informatization must solve its own problems ."

"Information technology provides a variety of ways for school informatization construction. But objectively, we have to admit that the situation of schools operating independently and developing independently has not been resolved, resulting in fragmented functions and differentiated standards ."

"Educational information is not connected to each other, and systems cannot be used with each other. You support your system and I support mine. The result is a mess. There are data islands everywhere, which does not fit in with the "one-stop service" of the Internet, which affects The realization and development of education modernization. Faced with these problems, digital base has become our new method to solve these problems. "

To build a digital base, it is essentially to build a comprehensive data governance system that is open and shared, technology integrated, and interactively visible, so that data between different platforms can be efficiently integrated and shared, forming an integrated "Internet of Things, Digital Internet, and Intelligent Internet" digital base ecology.

"Just like the '3I' refers to 'integration, intelligence, and internationalization,' we are now proposing new education infrastructure and building a digital base, which is a manifestation of integrated thinking. In order to end this chaos of fragmentation and move towards unity, "

Building a digital base: respecting market rules and working together between government, industry, academia and research

Having clarified the importance of digital bases, how should we build new bases? Liu Yongqian gave some suggestions.

First, we must realize the urgency of time.

In the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Construction of New Education Infrastructure and Building a High-Quality Education Support System" issued by six ministries and commissions, it is proposed that "by 2025, a new education infrastructure system with optimized structure, intensive efficiency, safety and reliability will be basically formed, and through Iterative upgrades, updates, improvements and continuous construction to achieve long-term and comprehensive development.”

"The state's promotion of the construction of school digital bases is to promote the implementation of new education infrastructure in schools. The two statements mean the same thing. The deadline is 2025, which is more urgent."

Second, Shanghai, as a national education digitalization pilot zone, has taken the lead in building an education digital base, providing experience that other regions can learn from. However, measures must be adapted to local conditions, and other regions cannot blindly copy the model when following up.

Third, the key to promoting the construction of educational digital bases lies in practical applications. In particular, central and western regions and rural areas need to combine local economic and social development and specific educational conditions and creatively adopt practices that are consistent with local realities to build educational digital bases.

"Our various regions and schools should creatively explore and form new mechanisms and methods based on their own basic conditions . Letting the digital base be implemented in schools does not mean that the schools themselves have to take over all the construction and become their own A set of systems. Implementation is for application. The most important thing for schools is that the function of the digital base is truly realized in their own school, not whether a certain set of equipment is successfully installed in your school .”

Fourth, the laws of the market must be respected. In the process of building an educational digital base, governments, enterprises, associations, and schools each assume different responsibilities and roles.

Liu Yongqian pointed out: "Currently, we have the correct policy guidance, but it is three feet away from the ground and not yet grounded. To truly implement it, we need cooperation between several departments of politics, academia, industry and research."

In his view, during the entire digital base construction process, the government's main responsibility lies in the formulation and promotion of policies, using administrative power to promote problem solving, and supervising the construction process; enterprises must work closely with local education departments to Create new technical methods and good management methods. It can also form a regional public basic capability base to provide radioactive services; the association organization focuses on selecting demonstration models and summarizing advanced experience so that educational digital bases can be widely established across the country; as the smallest unit in the construction of digital bases, schools must Purchase services based on actual needs, pay attention to feedback in specific practices, and continuously improve and optimize the application of digital bases.

Promoting digital bases: finding feasible, easy-to-operate and economical solutions

Through long-term observation and practice, Liu Yongqian fully realized the importance of selecting exemplary models. In order to promote the construction of educational digital base to counties and cities in the vast central and western regions and truly radiate across the country, we must face up to the important role played by enterprises. Among them, Ruijie Networks’ practical experience in Gansu provides feasible, easy-to-operate and economical solutions for building digital bases for primary and secondary schools in relatively economically backward areas.

So, what exactly do ICT infrastructure and solution providers represented by Ruijie Networks do? Take the reconstruction of the construction, management, and use model of teaching terminals as an example.

Observations show that computing resources widely distributed in schools in various districts and counties are generally underutilized. The server concurrency rate of most schools only maintains between 30% and 50%, which is far from reaching saturation. Based on this reality, Ruijie Networks envisions integrating and migrating these idle computing power to the cloud to achieve centralized dynamic management and allocation.

First, convert the computing power utilization model from “giving” to “taking”. Practical results prove that this measure effectively promotes balance and achieves on-demand coordination of resources.

Second, enhance the professional service capabilities of the Education Bureau. Traditional PCs have many connectors, are difficult to maintain, and have low on-site repair efficiency. Ruijie Networks simplifies the maintenance process through unified management and operation.

Third, assist scientific decision-making through digital management platforms. Through the management platform, data is presented from five aspects: teaching, application, assets, utilization, and energy consumption to comprehensively enhance the overall vision of decision-making.

Based on the concept of "one global cloud", Ruijie Networks has helped schools improve their fund utilization through centralized deployment and hyper-converged cloud computing platform resource pools, achieving the effect of getting 4 cents out of 1 penny spent.

Ruijie Networks’ education digitalization pilot in Gansu includes but is not limited to the deployment of cloud desktop projects and the implementation of the “Global One Cloud” project. These measures have improved the level of local education informatization and provided a new solution to the problem of insufficient and uneven allocation of high-quality educational resources.

write at the end

The wisdom of young people will make the country wise, and the strength of young people will make the country strong. Building an educational digital base is the key to educational innovation today and the foundation for tomorrow under the mission of the times. However, this future-oriented systematic project has never been accomplished overnight, but has been a long-lasting and vast expedition. Now that we have just started, only by gathering the wisdom and efforts of everyone can we write a glorious chapter in the future of education in this journey.