Globalization of Chinese Education

Greetings from the the IEEE 7th International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE) in Wollongong where Liang Zhao from Shenyang Aerospace University was speaking on "How We Face Globalization of Chinese Education" (Zhao, Dong, Li, Lin & Li, 2018,). This, I suggest, is also a question for Australian universities in the next few years.

Just as China has been increasingly producing quality goods at a competitive price, it now aiming to export education services. One interesting point in the paper is that international students in China are instructed in English (although this is not the first language of the staff or students). Australian educational institutions, and companies, may be able to provide specialist services to their Chinese counterparts.

"In the next decade, China is expectedly becoming
the most significant education destination for foreigners. Since information technology is a leading industry in China, its related major computer science would surely attract a considerable number of international students. Therefore, our university and teaching group are going to face this big challenge. Due to the scarcity of teaching resources in ordinary Chinese universities, we have to seek a way to fulfil the vast demand of educating these international students while especially most of them require lecturers provide courses in English. In this paper, we discuss the current problems of international education in China and whether the mixed English teaching can be one possible solution or not. Then we present our teaching reform strategies by showing an example of a module called Mobile Programming with Android. Through applying these strategies, we also list the numerical improvements of students results and skills."

Australian universities need to consider how they will respond to expanded Chinese offerings. As with consumer goods, they might try to compete on price, quality, or convenience. I will be speaking on alternative delivery methods for education in "Blended Learning for the Indo-Pacific" later in the conference. In this I suggest, rather than trying to directly compete, a more flexible form of education could be offered.

Reference

Zhao, L., Dong, Y., Li, Z., Lin, N., & Li, J. (2018, December). How We Face Globalization of Chinese Education. In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE) (pp. 635-640). IEEE. URL https://doi.org/10.1109/TALE.2018.8615155 (or request preprint)