The Chinese government wholeheartedly embraces educational technology, and the Open University of China (OUC) is at the centre of this movement. The Outline National Plan for China’s Medium- and Long-Term Educational Reform and Development issued in 2010 points out that "Information technology has revolutionary influences on educational development, to which great importance must be attached". Furthermore, the Plan for Ten Years’ Educational Informationization (2011-2020) issued in 2012, emphasizes that "Educational informationization should be considered as the strategic focus and priority in national informationization and should be comprehensively deployed and implemented at a higher speed". It requires "exploration of comprehensive and in-depth integration between modern information technology and education, leading the innovation of educational philosophy and educational approaches with informationization".

In his presentation, Dr Yang will describe how OUC has been commissioned, together with a number of “Radio and TV Universities”, to explore developmental models for open universities. In this context, Dr Yang writes that "I believe that through our joint efforts and extensive social supports, the Open University of China will definitely become a university of a new type in the Chinese higher-education system, a first-class open university with Chinese characteristics in the worldwide open-university system and an important pillar of China's learning society."

About Yang Zhijian

Before his appointment as President of OUC in July 2010, Dr Yang served as Deputy Director-General of the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education of China. In 1991 he paid an academic visit to Ohio University in the USA, and in 2003 he obtained his doctorate of education at Peking University. He worked within macro-management and macro-policy making from 1983 to 2010 at the Ministry of Education. His academic interest mainly focuses on research on higher education and mass higher education. He has published many academic papers in leading academic journals of China, and his monograph Research on the Objectives of Cultivating Undergraduates in Chinese Higher Education Institutions (HEI) was published in 2005. In this book, he explored and discussed the formation and evolution, as well as the the issues and challenges facing undergraduate programmes in HEIs since the establishment of the new China.