Disrupted classes, undisrupted learning during COVID-19 outbreak in China: application of open educational practices and resources

TLDR

The COVID‑19 outbreak in China halted face‑to‑face teaching, leaving over 270 million students unable to attend school and exposing challenges such as time constraints and isolation. The study explores how open educational resources and practices can address these challenges, proposing a generic OEP framework and future adoption recommendations. The Ministry of Education’s “Ensuring learning undisrupted” initiative restructured the education system with an online component, and the authors developed guidelines for effective OER/OEP use based on the framework and expert input from national seminars. The results demonstrate that applying OER and OEP can improve learning experiences and outcomes during the COVID‑19 outbreak, offering a practical model for researchers and educators.

Abstract

With the coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in China, the Chinese government decided to ban any type of face-to-face teaching, disrupting classes and resulting in over 270 million students being unable to return to their universities/schools. Therefore, the Ministry of Education (MoE) launched an initiative titled 'Ensuring learning undisrupted when classes are disrupted' by reforming the entire educational system and including an online education component. However, this quick reform in this unexpected critical situation of widespread COVID-19 cases harbours several challenges, such as the lack of time and teacher/student isolation. This paper discusses the possibility of using open educational resources (OER) and open educational practices (OEP) as an effective educational solution to overcome these challenges. Particularly, this study presents a generic OEP framework built on existing open-practice definitions. It then presents, based on this framework and based on the challenges reported by several Chinese education specialists during two national online seminars, a set of guidelines for the effective use of OER and OEP for both teaching and learning. Finally, this study presents some recommendations for the better adoption of OER and OEP in the future. The findings of this study can help researchers and educators apply OER and OEP for better learning experiences and outcomes during the COVID-19 outbreak.