Building a Digital Education Community to Facilitate High-Quality Education Development

Education is the cornerstone for national strength and economic development, the lighthouse for talent and innovation, and the vessel for cultural exchange and inheritance. The latest round of technological revolution brings precious opportunity to the education industry. Digital resources are essential to improving teaching quality, efficiency, and experience.

Promoting the Collaborative Development of Digital Education

As we stride boldly into the digital age, nations across the globe are exploring ways to foster the transformation of their education sectors. Applying emerging technologies to drive education’s digitalization has become commonplace. So, how can this be achieved?

● Connect and aggregate education resources under all scenarios

The development of education requires a well-established infrastructure and advanced digital technologies to integrate services, management, technologies, data, and applications. Digital education should also be ‘all-scenario-oriented,’ covering multiple applications. Integrating teaching, research, governance, and services at multiple levels empowers intelligent education.

● Support all-round openness and collaboration

Digitalization requires cooperation from the involved parties, including governments, schools, enterprises, and society, to eliminate digital barriers, narrow the digital gap, improve crisis response, promote transformation and innovation, and coordinate ICT application’s in-depth integration. Digital education needs converged connectivity, computing, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and security support, along with the digitalization of services and management to enable multi-layered and all-around collaboration among network hubs, applications, and connections. If governments, schools, enterprises, and society can shake hands on this concept, nations can bridge the digital divide and make education more accessible than ever.

● Full-lifecycle O&M and continuous evolution

For digital education to continue evolving, we must change the idea to emphasize construction over operation and short-term gains over long-term results. Construction is only the first step. After that, we need to integrate educational data and content resources, devise new service scenarios, and improve the service experience. This calls for cooperation between governments, schools, enterprises, and the public so digital education can develop smoothly and sustainably.

A Digital Education Community

Just as people are at the heart of all development efforts, teachers and students lie at the heart of education. With this in mind, Huawei has proposed the concept of the ‘digital education community,’, an industry first. The most important thing to advancement in this space is the experience and feedback of teachers and students. The guidance of government policies, the practices of colleges and universities, and the support of enterprise products and services without the feedback of the people who are entrenched in them risk becoming tone-deaf. These elements, however, build a sustainable digital education community that thrives sustainably. To constantly make evolution and optimization possible, digital education should connect physical, digital, and public spaces.

The digital education community aims to make the industry smart. First, we must focus on teachers and students and upgrade intelligent teaching applications to improve teaching quality, efficiency, and experience. This encompasses our core vision. Second, we can build an intelligent hub that keeps up with the demands of the industry by applying cloud, AI, and computing technologies. Third, through intelligent connections and interaction systems, teaching and research environments and devices can be widely connected. Finally, the digital education community must require a consensus on digital education. It needs to come together to accelerate digital transformation across all education and research sectors. Collaboration is what will create a win-win situation where all can enjoy the fruits borne of digitalization.

● The iHarbour — Intelligent Education Town in Shaanxi: Huawei's first launch of the digital education community in China

Intelligent Education Town in Shaanxi is Huawei's first execution of the digital education community practice in China, set up in partnership with the Ministry of Education, Shaanxi Province, and Xi'an Jiaotong University. It is a four-in-one body that combines campus, town, industrial campus, and community. By integrating technologies, services, and industries, it is expected to serve as an example of higher education reform and urbanization across China.

By providing industry-leading, future-oriented products, and solutions, Huawei has built a smart campus featuring cloud-network integration and multi-network convergence to widely apply various services and applications in iHarbour. The Intelligent Education Town caters to the needs of production, education, and research, providing valuable experience and reference for the development of new infrastructure and intelligent education in China's ‘new cities’.

● Macau University of Science and Technology: Synergy between campus environment, teaching, and research

Macau University of Science and Technology houses well-equipped research platforms and teaching buildings. As it has discovered, a people-centered campus service system built by all that benefit all allows synergy between the campus environment, teaching and research, and campus services. It cooperated with Huawei to provide highly reliable infrastructure under centralized management for data centers. It also applied an intelligent O&M platform with big data analysis and machine learning algorithms to transform passive O&M into proactive O&M. It signed a cooperation agreement with Huawei on Huawei ICT Academy to send excellent digital talent to the Greater Bay Area while introducing HUAWEI IdeaHub to build smart classrooms that harness high-quality teaching materials and encourage student-centric learning.

● Join hands with other countries and regions to explore the digitalization of education

Huawei built a next-generation wireless network covering all scenarios, including classrooms, auditoriums, and offices in Hasseris Middle School, Denmark. The wireless network realizes virtual network planning and deployment and also supports automatic and intelligent network management as well as minute-level service rollout, greatly simplifying network construction and deployment.

In Honduras, Huawei has built an intelligent next-generation digital campus network for the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras (National Autonomous University of Honduras). The network connects the university's nine campuses and offers wireless coverage, allowing teachers and students to access high-speed network services at any time and from any location. Wired and wireless networks are integrated to ensure online education for the university's eight regional, five remote, and eight remote learning resource centers.

Huawei helped the Ministry of Education and Sciences in Paraguay to provide broadband access and wireless network coverage for over 3000 primary and secondary schools. This supports education resource sharing and narrows the gap between urban and rural education nationwide.

More and more practices show that digital education requires the support of a strong and collaborative community where participants from the education industry, services, technologies, management, funds, and talent are all centrally planned.

New Advantages in High-Quality Education

The digital education community boasts the following advantages when it comes to promoting the high-quality development of the education industry:

● Drive the construction of new infrastructure and build a novel basis for education fairness

To promote fair education, we must interconnect digital devices efficiently and share high-quality education resources promptly. This is why connection, computing, cloud, and artificial intelligence are key technical elements to building a digital world and are considered the cornerstone for developing digital education. High-speed networks implement cross-school and cross-region sharing and learning, enabling people in different countries, regions, and environments to enjoy high-quality education resources through wired and wireless networks.

● Improve education quality, efficiency, and experience

Digital technologies are inseparable from modern teaching and learning activities. Teaching results and student growth can be accurately and precisely reflected through information aggregation, mining, analysis, supervision, and evaluation, providing teachers with data-based teaching feedback and students with personalized learning solution suggestions. As a result, teachers can tailor their teaching approaches and students can learn based on their needs anytime, anywhere. In addition, digital technologies backed up with the support of data help government education management departments scientifically evaluate and improve teaching across regions. All these things will tremendously improve education quality.

● Facilitate talent cultivation, scientific research, and industry innovation and transformation

The digitalization of teaching and scientific research environments like campuses, classrooms, libraries, and labs is gradually coming to support applications in scenarios such as learning analysis, teaching evaluation, online and offline hybrid learning, and teaching and scientific research linkage. This improves the experience and results of teaching, scientific research, management, and service processes. Data allows more precise teaching method analysis, education management, and evaluation so that teachers can personalize their teaching approaches to each student's aptitude, personality, and interests.

The digital education community arose naturally according to time and circumstance. As time passes, Huawei will use its technical advantages in connectivity, cloud, computing, and artificial intelligence, as well as the assets of the ICT industry chain, to propel the education industry. We will work to advance related upstream and downstream industries and foster a new digital education ecosystem. With the digital education community, we will transform classroom teaching and talent cultivation models, integrate and innovate teaching technologies, and accelerate the growth of high-quality education.