Intelligent Education for a Digital Future

As Mr. Cai Yuanpei, a Chinese philosopher who was an influential figure in the history of Chinese modern education, once said, "educators are not for the past, not for the present, but for the future."

Over the course of human civilization, society has grown and changed, but the essence of education always remains constant: spreading knowledge and resolving confusion. While this remains true, our methods of education are constantly evolving; the development of technologies like cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence are driving a profound reform in the education industry.

As the technology available to us becomes smarter, the way we approach education is becoming more personalized, flexible, adaptive, and proactive. Teaching is shifting from teacher-centric instruction to student-centric learning, meaning the role of the teacher is shifting towards guiding students to grow and learn for themselves. Digital education plays an important role in this change. In China, policies such as the Mid- and Long-Term Development Plan for Education Informatization (2021-2035) and the 14th Five-Year Plan for Education Informatization set differentiated informatization goals for higher, vocational, general, pre-school, and adult education. In the EU, the European Commission has launched the Digital Education Action Plan (2021-2027), which lays out key goals like building a digital ecosystem for education and improving the digital literacy of teachers and students to comprehensively facilitate the digitalization of education.

Currently, a new round of technological and industrial revolution is booming, driving human society rapidly towards an era of digital economy. To stay ahead of the curve, the education industry must digitalize, and make information technology applications common in the classroom.

Huawei believes that to realize smart education, we must first formulate a top-level strategy, follow it to develop solutions and finally use technologies to support solution execution. In this way, we can build a robust education ecosystem that can cultivate bright, innovation-oriented talent for the intelligent future.

1. Strategy: To realize universal and equal education, it is nowhere near enough to rely solely on one enterprise. Based on our ICT strengths and in-depth understanding of the industry, Huawei proposes the concept of "digital education community" and hopes to work with partners and customers to build it. Together, we can facilitate the high-quality development of education digitalization. Huawei brings to the table advanced technologies in terms of cloud, network, edge, and devices to connect, aggregate, and share education resources in all scenarios, as well as offer full-cycle O&M and continuous evolution.

2. Solution: The integration between digital technologies and education scenarios brings both opportunities and challenges. The bar has been set high in terms of solution development standards. Currently, Huawei uses the "Five Ones" technical architecture — one screen, one network, one cloud, one platform, and one entrance — to cover all education scenarios, including higher education, basic education, and scientific research. With ICT as the backbone, Huawei provides leading smart education solutions for ever-changing education scenarios.

3. Technology: W. Brian Arthur wrote in his book The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, "In the real world, technologies are highly reconfigurable; they are fluid things, never static, never finished, never perfect." Huawei constantly seeks to enrich our understanding of technology evolution. As a leading global ICT solution provider, Huawei believes in people-oriented education and is committed to integrating ICTs like cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence into the entire education process to make teaching, scientific research, management, and services more innovative.

Traditional education informatization is dominated by products. Products and services are provided based on the requirements of the teaching environment. Informatization methods are only auxiliary and cannot be innovated. The significance of smart education is to integrate new technologies into scenarios, work with partners to apply new technologies in industries and regions, and give every individual student the right education for them through innovation.

Huawei cooperates with universities to develop industry specialists in a new model that combines teaching resources with real industrial practices. We also work with the Ministry of Education of China to build a regional education cloud platform based on big data, cloud computing, and mobile terminal technologies for hybrid learning to leave no learner behind. In addition, we cooperate with industry associations and regional partners to build robust education ecosystems through innovation centers. Through these measures, we have expedited the development of a smart education ecosystem.

With the concerted efforts of all customers and partners in the education industry, Huawei has served more than 120 countries and regions around the world, helping over 2800 education ministries, universities, and research institutes explore digital education. We are now a preferred partner for digital transformation in the education industry.

For example, in the higher education field, Macau University of Science and Technology cooperated with Huawei to establish a lightweight, elastic, high-performance, and highly reliable infrastructure under centralized management for data centers. In the basic education field, Huawei represents a comprehensive blueprint to enable fair and inclusive education based on technical capabilities like high-speed inter-school network interconnection, cloud classroom, and smart classroom. Huawei's wireless network solution has built an on-premise cloud management platform for the Ministry of Education of the United Arab Emirates. This platform allows the Ministry to manage over 400 schools at the same time. It provides convenient Wi-Fi access anytime and anywhere, helping schools explore more advanced teaching methods, for example, e-schoolbags, smart whiteboards, virtual classrooms, and online interactive teaching to make education smarter. In terms of scientific research, the new data center within the Egypt National Research Center builds a cloud platform that connects research institutes across the country, supported by Huawei's modular design, NetEco intelligent management system, and UPS modular redundancy design.

Global advancement depends on talent, and the cultivation of talent depends on education. Education is the cornerstone for a country and the future of civilization.

In the future, Huawei will continue to invest in R&D and deeply engage in the education industry to apply more core technologies including the likes of IoT, big data, artificial intelligence, and cloud in education scenarios. We hope to keep setting benchmarks, build a digital education community, and use smart education to light up an intelligent future.