After returning to offline classes, where should online education go?

This article is reprinted from Intel Internet of Things, the original author is China Teachers Newspaper

The little beasts are finally back home! Many parents shed tears of joy and said they could finally breathe a sigh of relief. With the resumption of classes for non-graduation students in Beijing's primary and secondary schools in June, students in most parts of the country have returned to school. Parents are relieved for the time being, but schools are facing real challenges.

During the epidemic, universities, colleges and primary and secondary schools across the country delayed the start of school and implemented online teaching, which started a large-scale online education experiment in human history. As the normal order of education and teaching gradually resumes, the campus will also regain its former vitality and vigor. After returning to school and returning to the real offline classroom, where should online education go? Should it return to the starting point, or seize the opportunity to continue upgrading and achieve a deep integration of online and offline education?

The answer is obviously the latter.

During the epidemic, conducting online teaching is a necessary measure for the sake of rights and interests, but educational informatization is the direction of educational reform. After the epidemic, the direction of the tide will not change.

The outbreak of the epidemic has greatly promoted the popularization and improvement of online education. During the period of online teaching, education departments, schools at all levels and training institutions have gained more experience and understanding of educational informatization and intelligence. This experience and experience will inevitably have a profound impact on teachers and students, and will plant the seeds of educational informatization in the hearts of teachers and students. Entering the post-epidemic stage, educational informatization will continue to accelerate, the organizational form of schools will face profound changes, the integration and development of online and offline education is crucial, and educational informatization will also reconstruct construction standards.

As Yuan Zhenguo, a famous education scholar and dean of the School of Education at East China Normal University, said, many teachers and students have gradually adapted to online education, and some even prefer it. "We should take this large-scale use of online education as an opportunity to achieve the transformation and upgrading of online education, create the possibility of providing optional education, and explore the future for large-scale personalized education."

Practice has proved that China has laid a solid foundation for the large-scale online education experiment due to its continuous efforts in promoting educational informatization. However, some shortcomings and deficiencies have also been exposed in the process of online teaching.

In the post-epidemic period, what is the future direction of educational informatization? How to learn from each other's strengths and overcome weaknesses to further promote the construction of smart education? Intel may provide a wonderful answer.

During the online education process, more than 200 million Chinese students have flocked to major online learning platforms, resulting in a surge in the number of online users and various degrees of "crash" on online teaching platforms. Among the problems exposed by online teaching during this epidemic, hardware problems are undoubtedly the biggest problem.

However, problems such as the weak interactivity of online education and the difficulty for teachers to fully understand students' learning situation in order to carry out personalized teaching also affect the effectiveness of online teaching.

How to solve problems such as server overload crashes and video freezes, and improve the hardware functions of smart education and teaching systems, including the processing, display, and storage performance of terminal devices, to support the load integration capabilities in smart classroom application scenarios, and more complete network and wireless routing connections?

How to make up for the lack of interaction through technological means? On the one hand, use technologies such as artificial intelligence to trace and evaluate the teaching effect throughout the entire process; on the other hand, use big data analysis to gain insight into students' learning needs and promote the development of personalized teaching.

After returning to school and resuming offline teaching scenarios, how to accelerate the innovative application of information technology and intelligent technology in the field of education, build ubiquitous, flexible and intelligent smart classrooms, online classroom environments and application models, and promote the deep integration of online and offline teaching.

These are new challenges that the online education industry must face.

As a world-renowned PC and server chip manufacturer, the education market has always been an important market that Intel pays great attention to. Intel firmly believes that innovation and change are the driving force for the development of education. With its understanding of education change over the years, Intel has focused on building an end-to-end education solution of "smart campus", "smart classroom" and "smart class" based on Intel computing platforms, promoting the implementation of smart education, and realizing a student-centered 360-degree learning experience and teaching and management innovation centered on teachers and managers.

How to improve the performance of smart education hardware and solve storage, security, and application integration issues are the basis for ensuring the operation of online teaching. Intel has a Xeon Scalable Processor platform that can support the construction of campus network big data and cloud service platforms, and unify the online management of electronic reading rooms, multimedia classrooms, laboratories, or computer room equipment, thereby improving the overall performance of smart classrooms.

The integration of online and offline education means that application scenarios such as dual-teacher classrooms, micro-classrooms, famous teacher lectures, and data analysis based on deep learning will become more and more common. In response to this, Intel provides a complete and fully optimized overall solution from cloud to end. The overall video recording and broadcasting solution based on Intel architecture can help users reduce 90% of the media application development and optimization costs, and can maximize the hardware capabilities of the Intel platform.

During home learning, the problem of low interactivity in online education has attracted much attention. The Atom and Core series processors launched by Intel can support intelligent devices such as electronic whiteboards, educational PCs, and smart tablets, fully display the content of courseware, and conduct interactive communication between teachers and students, making learning more participatory and interactive. The advantage of educational informatization is that it can collect and analyze students' behaviors in the classroom with the help of technologies such as big data and artificial intelligence, helping teachers to prepare lessons and teach efficiently and realize personalized teaching. In this regard, Intel has AI computing platforms such as FPGA and Movidius, which can support various AI applications in the field of education, including deep learning AI data analysis applications such as senseless attendance and classroom learning assessment analysis, helping teachers to better understand the teaching and learning situation, thereby greatly improving the efficiency of teaching and learning, and helping personalized teaching to truly take root.

At present, many schools have completed the construction of some information application systems, providing a good teaching environment for school information construction. However, due to the lack of unified technical system standards and detailed overall construction plans, application systems are often deployed independently, which ultimately leads to information intercommunication, data sharing, and teaching quality and teaching management cannot be improved, which runs counter to the original intention of school information construction.

"China's Education Modernization 2035" proposes to accelerate educational reform in the information age, build intelligent campuses, and coordinate the construction of an integrated intelligent teaching, management and service platform. The "Implementation Plan for Accelerating Education Modernization (2018-2022)" also proposes to use information technology to serve the entire education process, accelerate the innovative development of smart education, and build an "Internet + Education" support service platform.

However, it is obviously not something that a single company can accomplish by coordinating the construction of an integrated intelligent teaching, management and service platform and promoting the construction of smart education. As an upstream chip solution manufacturer, Intel cannot achieve its goal in the education industry by itself. It needs to bring the final solution to the education industry through many partners to provide the education industry with more meaningful and valuable things.

To this end, Intel is continuously working with upstream and downstream partners in the industry chain, including Blue Pigeon, to actively promote the innovative development of educational informatization. Pudong Digital Learning Center is a typical example of Intel working with its partner Blue Pigeon Group to actively promote the innovative development of educational informatization and accelerate the pace of educational informatization.

In order to solve the problems of information intercommunication, data sharing, and improvement of teaching quality and management during the application of campus informatization, the Shanghai Pudong Education Bureau took the lead in selecting 15 primary and secondary schools to participate in the first batch of pilot projects, and built the Pudong Digital Learning Center, which integrates computer classrooms, electronic reading rooms, and digital voice classrooms. It has become a pioneer in education reform in the era of Education Informatization 2.0.

Blue Pigeon Group provided advanced products and cutting-edge concepts for the construction of Pudong Digital Learning Center, helping the Pudong Digital Learning Center to be perfectly presented.

Relying on the Blue Pigeon Smart Campus Solution, the Pudong Digital Learning Center has fully built an intelligent and integrated teaching scene.

In terms of school-side construction, we have completed the construction of projects including teaching terminal environment, teaching auxiliary equipment, school teaching applications, recording and broadcasting systems, face recognition systems, electronic class sign systems, and virtual experiment platforms for physics, chemistry, and biology.

On the education bureau side, we have completed the construction of a big data, visual teaching application integrated display system, which not only enables online class inspections and intelligent management and control of teaching equipment, but also enables the sharing of data information, providing strong data support for analyzing student learning conditions and teaching resources.

On the classroom side, objects in the classroom that do not have the ability to provide information feedback, such as curtains, lights, and air conditioners, are given the ability to switch intelligently, achieving the goal of intelligently controlling teaching equipment.

In order to ensure the service work of various software in the smart classroom and the realization of functions such as information transmission and exchange, sound amplification, and to ensure the normal teaching activities of teachers and students, each smart classroom in the Pudong Digital Learning Center is equipped with a "Blue Pigeon Smart Host" using an Intel® processor as the classroom control host.

The Blue Pigeon smart host and its various application software, through integrated design, ensure the high scalability of the system, making "education + AI" possible. The smart classroom can cover teaching, recording, live broadcast on demand systems, distance learning, conference systems, smart class sign systems, classroom interaction systems, smart attendance systems, learning situation analysis systems, and smart access control systems.

The Blue Pigeon Smart Campus Solution, through its "integrated" design concept, has completely solved the problem of information islands in each subsystem of the digital campus, effectively promoted campus information sharing and exchange, and expanded the channels for teachers and students to acquire knowledge and information.

It is foreseeable that in the 2.0 stage of educational informatization, innovative research and demonstration of smart education based on technologies such as AI, big data, and the Internet of Things will make the construction of smart campuses a major component and important way to promote educational equity. This is also an important direction for educational informatization in the post-epidemic stage.

This is exactly Intel's advantage and direction. At present, Intel is committed to integrating information technology into every aspect of teaching and management, and is continuously driving the development of smart campuses with its own computing power core, and implementing the educational informatization vision of "360-degree innovative education".

In the future, Intel will continue to meet customer needs, adapt to technological trends, and work with partners to jointly create an education industry chain model, continuously promote the implementation and development of China's education informatization 2.0, and strive to actively promote the innovative development of education informatization, thereby realizing a new smart education ecosystem that is efficient, fair, and personalized.

The article is reproduced from: China Teachers Newspaper

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