Developing a Modern Infrastructure for Open Distance Education in China: The Implementation of the NCEC Project

The NCEC project was a joint venture between China and Europe to deliver Internet-based distance education in China. The project was proposed in 1995, sponsored by the European Union since 1998, and finally completed in 2002. This paper shows how the NCEC project was planned and developed, and the importance of its role in the history of Internet application development in China

Development and construction of China

Libraries in China's higher education institutions have been developing in keeping pace with the flourishing development of China's higher education. This article aims to make an introduction to the construction of China's higher education libraries, especially the recent three decades' achievements since China's reform and opening-up in 1978. In this article, the authors draw a general picture of the development of libraries in China's higher education institutions, covering such eight aspects as management, types and positioning, organizational structure and personnel, expenditure and buildings, reader service, building and sharing of resources as well as automation system.</p

METS-Based Cataloging Toolkit for Digital Library Management System

This toolkit is designed for the Digital Library Management System of Tsinghua University (TH-DLMS). The aim of TH-DLMS is to build up a platform to preserve various kinds of digitalized resources, manage distributed repositories and provide kinds of service for research and education. This toolkit fulfills the cataloging and preservation functions of TH-DLMS. METS (Metadata Encoding and T ransmission Standard) encoded documents are used as the final storage format of metadata, including descriptive metadata, structural metadata and administrative metadata, and submitted to a management system based on Fedora (Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture)

A Socio-Technical Metaverse Development Framework in Higher Education

The concept of the metaverse has recently generated a great deal of attention in academia and industry, with an increasing number of educational institutions expressing interest in its implementation. However, existing studies on metaverse development in higher education are still in their early stages, leaving institutions with little guidance on how to develop and implement a metaverse. Employing socio-technical theory, we propose a comprehensive nine-stage metaverse development framework (MDF) that incorporates both social and technical aspects of a metaverse initiative, thus providing a holistic approach to metaverse development. Leveraging case studies of three large universities and blending them with MDF, our study provides evidence of the applicability of our MDF and offers a better contextual understanding of metaverse development in educational settings. This paper is useful for educational institutions that are developing or considering metaverse initiatives. It contributes to the emerging literature on metaverse development in higher education

The framework for the development of the southeast Tsinghua University campus

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-87).Tsinghua University is located in the northwest of Beijing. Tsinghua University is one of the best universities focusing on science, engineering, and technology in P. R. CHINA. At present, Tsinghua University is aiming to develop the University not only as one of the national bases for higher learning and for scientific research and technological development but also as one the most beautiful green campuses in the country. My main goal in this design thesis is: remove and demolish some old buildings and build up a campus net for the 21st century; establish a clear strategy for the long-range growth and future development; create out a big green belt in the campus and contribute it to the whole city; establish and enhance the civic structure of the campus by defining open space, giving the space new character, and creating the visual linkages and movement patterns; design a 24-hour campus community.by Junfu Zhu.S.M

How to avoid a local epidemic becoming a global pandemic

Here, we combine international air travel passenger data with a standard epidemiological model of the initial 3 mo of the COVID-19 pandemic (January through March 2020; toward the end of which the entire world locked down). Using the information available during this initial phase of the pandemic, our model accurately describes the main features of the actual global development of the pandemic demonstrated by the high degree of coherence between the model and global data. The validated model allows for an exploration of alternative policy efficacies (reducing air travel and/or introducing different degrees of compulsory immigration quarantine upon arrival to a country) in delaying the global spread of SARS-CoV-2 and thus is suggestive of similar efficacy in anticipating the spread of future global disease outbreaks. We show that a lesson from the recent pandemic is that reducing air travel globally is more effective in reducing the global spread than adopting immigration quarantine. Reducing air travel out of a source country has the most important effect regarding the spreading of the disease to the rest of the world. Based upon our results, we propose a digital twin as a further developed tool to inform future pandemic decision-making to inform measures intended to control the spread of disease agents of potential future pandemics. We discuss the design criteria for such a digital twin model as well as the feasibility of obtaining access to the necessary online data on international air travel

A Critique of Chinese Education

The biggest problem of the state-controlled children’s education in the People’s Republic of China is that the system focuses more on the method of education rather than learning of children themselves. Thus the children lack of internal motivation to learn. Moreover, the typical education in China tend to isolate the students from the neighborhood, lacking a chance for students to really interact and experiement hands on with new knwoledge. However, this problem aspect can be overcame by learning from the western pedagogical strategies, such as the Montessori Education. For this educational approach, the primary goal is to stimulate children’s internal motivation to learn. Children have more freedom to make decisions. What are they going to learn? Where? When? and How? A school building designed to spatialize these pedagogical strategies could rely on architectural tactics which produce the following effects. The school itself becomes a part of the urban infrastructure to connect the school community with the neighborhood, which allows children to have more interaction with its surroundings and the society. Also, within the school, minor learning space is added to create a framework within which children can use to develop their own meaning of learning. At the same time, informal learning spaces are created to extend and enhance children’s learning experiences outside the classroom boxes. In this way, I contend that the school as a learning institution and the architecture that gives it spatial form and urban presence both act as a critique of current practice