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."

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

As the technology available becomes smarter, and its potential to transform industry becomes greater, there are brand new skills that must be developed through education to ensure that today’s students – and tomorrow’s workforce – are prepared to build on the foundations of innovation being laid today.

To ensure this can happen, education must also follow these trends, adapting to the new round of technological and industrial revolution that is driving human society rapidly towards an era of digital economy. In order to effectively implement new lessons that will support the development of a workforce equipped with the right new skills, we must first formulate a top-level strategy, follow it to develop solutions, and finally use technologies to support solution execution:

1. Strategy: to realise 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 digitalisation. 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 intelligent 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. 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.

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 centres. Through these measures, we have expedited the development of a smarter education ecosystem.

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 centralised management for data centres. 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 centre 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 civilisation. Recognising this, Huawei takes an extremely proactive approach to ensuring this talent and new skills can be developed to bring through the next generation of technology adoption.

Huawei’s global ICT Academy programme is a significant part of this effort, and is designed to bridge the digital skills gap and empower individuals with the knowledge and expertise required to thrive in a technology-driven environment. The academy offers a wide range of training programmes and certifications that are aimed at developing specialised skills in areas such as AI, big data and cloud computing, and are shaped and delivered by industry experts to ensure participants get the latest practical information.

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 intelligent education to light up an intelligent future.