Coronavirus and Rise of Online Education: China

At the beginning of 2020, humanity faced the threat of a virus that allegedly originated in Wuhan, China. This virus spread rapidly to the environment and became a threat to the whole world, affecting the global economy and countries, taking different measures and practices. At the beginning of these practices, there are actions taken by states or local governments such as flight bans, quarantine, martial law, and regulations for maintaining social distance. The suppression approach, which envisages reducing the movement as much as possible by keeping the masses at home for a while in order to slow down the epidemic, has outweighed the approach to establish community immunity by allowing the virus to spread without its intervention and has been adopted as a universal practice in all countries. After the health sector, the education sector is one of the sectors most affected by this situation. According to the latest data from the United Nations, 770 million learners (students, etc.) in the world have been affected by the closure of schools and universities. In this sense, the distance education approach, which includes discussions about whether it is possible or not, is applicable or is practical, has been put into use as the most accessible and most functional solution in terms of ensuring the sustainability of education with the effect of the virus spreading all over the world. Because existing distance education systems have started to be accepted as a usable education method all over the world, mainly thanks to the spread of techniques such as MOOC, platforms that have become large-scale learning centres, especially Coursera, Udemy, Udacity, and Edex, have been instrumental in the spread of various courses around the world by making agreements with the most influential universities. In fact, the first application of distance education in the world started with the announcement of "Shortcut Lessons" published in the Boston newspaper in 1728. In the 19th century, "Letter Composition Lessons" began to be given to women at the University of Sweden, and University Correspondence College was established in 1843 for teaching by letter (Arat & Bakan, 2011). The use of distance education can be considered as one of the indicators of countries, institutions and even individuals to adapt to the era they are in and the technology that has been reached.

China 

300 years after the distance education the letter education model in the 1700s, education has been given over the internet worldwide. Today, there are hardly any universities, high schools or primary education institutions that do not have online education programs in developed and developing countries. Although they do not provide synchronous (synchronous) or asynchronous (non-synchronous) education, applications such as sharing lecture notes, homework submission, attendance list, sharing the education-teaching semester calendar are also included in the scope of online education. Thanks to the developing hardware technology, distance education projects started to be produced with virtual reality, augmented reality and even mixed reality glasses. While some experts define distance education as devoid of the spirit of face-to-face communication, it is also possible to encounter university administrators who think that this system will create unhealthy graduates (Lau, Yang, & Dasgupta, 2020). These concerns are also valid for traditional in-class face-to-face education that is not updated according to the age requirements.

After the Covid-19 epidemic, schools of all countries suspend physical education, and online education has been compulsory. Online education is no longer the last resort; it has become the only resort. In parallel with the measures on health, the states have decided to return to online education systems within their means in order to ensure the sustainability of education and not to let learners fall into a vacuum. The scope and effects of online education projects in the countries most affected by the Covid-19 epidemic in the world today are described below. Beyond the assessments here, the Director of the World Health Organization (WHO), In his statement, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says, regarding the reopening of schools and businesses very soon, "The last thing any country needs is to open schools and businesses and have to close them again due to the resurgence of the virus" (Lee B. Y., 2020). Rain Classroom teaching platform, which is the most advanced and effective online teaching platform in China and currently has the second-highest number of users (more than 19 million) globally, was launched in 2016. Tsinghua University is one of the leading universities in China's online transition in this regard. At the beginning of the millennium, they have taken decisive steps in online education to facilitate the learning of all students, especially university students (MacauUniversity, 2018). Although all campus-based classes were suspended except for some laboratory and applied course components after Covid-19, teaching for all courses continued through online platforms. Extraordinary efforts have been made to prepare faculty and students for the digital transition, and more than 25,000 students have been presented with 4,254 different courses by 2,681 faculty members (Lau, Yang, & Dasgupta, 2020). This situation not only affected Chinese students but immediately after the start of the epidemic, many of the half a million international students enrolled in universities in China and Hong Kong had to log into distance education systems from their home countries to continue their courses. In addition, online solutions were sought for an estimated 100,000 Chinese international students studying in Australia who went home to China for the "Lunar New Year" but were prevented from returning to their schools in Australia after the pandemic declaration due to Australia's reciprocal travel ban with China. This situation has also affected other countries where Chinese students study intensively, such as the UK and Canada (Lau, Yang, & Dasgupta, 2020).

On the other hand, there are also some negative approaches to the subject. For example, Yang Hai Wen, Vice President of Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, criticizes this digital transformation in education due to the epidemic. Wen stated that online education "will create more unhealthy graduates and more frustration in interpersonal communication". Experts aren't the only ones taking negative stances on China's transition to all-out online education; some students also showed an attitude towards distance education practices. The students invited by the instructors to the online course link had problems in benefiting from this system, both because they did not like this education model and because of the inadequacies or inconveniences in working from home conditions (such as the living together of the household and the confusion in the life culture). In fact, a group of students were given the nicknames of "silent" and "silent" on social media because they kept their microphones turned off while attending classes due to reasons such as background noises (Lau, Yang, & Dasgupta, 2020).

Reference

Arat, T., & Bakan, Ö. (2011). Uzaktan Eğitim Ve Uygulamaları. Selçuk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Meslek Yüksek Okulu Dergisi, 365, 14(1-2).

Lau, J., Yang, B., & Dasgupta, R. (2020, 003 12). Will the coronavirus make online education go viral? timeshighereducation. com: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/features/ will-coronavirus-make-online-education-go-viral 

Lee, B. Y. (2020, 03 26). How Long Should Social Distancing Last? When Will COVID-19 Coronavirus End? forbes.com: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2020/03/26/ how-long-should-social-distancing-last-when-will-covid-19-coronavirus-end/#26d4f924429a 

MacauUniversity. (2018, 05 14). A Quick Start Guide to Rain Classroom, a Next-Generation Digital Learning Environment. ctle.um.edu.mo: https://ctle.um.edu.mo/2018/05/14/quick-start-guide-to-rain-classroom/ 

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