China should push to advance distance education, which still lags far behind developed countries, experts said in Beijing Thursday at the opening ceremony of the China International Distance Education Conference 2010.

Zhang Yaoxue, academician with the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said China's distance education faces five challenges in comparison with its foreign counterparts: low quality of content, inconvenience of Internet access, unclear motive of development, low level of service, lack of policy support.

"We should speed up China's distance education to meet the increasingly diversified demands of the people," Zhang said.

China began to develop distance education in the early 1980s, shortly after the country adopted the reform and opening-up policy. The original examples of China's distance education were by radio and TV broadcasting.

According to Zhang, China should improve the quality of distance education courses by making the multi-media methods more accessible and diversified, and push forward resource sharing among domestic and international distance education institutes.

"The government should pour more money into building a 'learning supermarket', from which different schools and individuals may find useful tools and knowledge," Zhang said.

Yang Zhijian, president of the Open University of China (OUC), said the OUC, over the past 30 years since its founding, had been dedicated to develop a national open university with its teaching resources, sharing with 44 province-level radio and TV universities.

"By offering both degree-oriented and non-degree-oriented distance education, the open education system has cultivated tens of millions of personnel that meets the grass-root demand of local society," Yang said.

As of 2006, 67 universities in 31 Chinese province-level regions have launched distance education services.

However, Yang said a lot of work needs to be done to build a better open university. "We should reform our teaching methods into a career-oriented style, and establish a 'credit-bank' system by which students can earn and accumulate credits to provide a more flexible education."

Additionally, the population of school-age students in China will decrease by 36 million within the next ten years, and that will make higher education institutes develop more diversified teaching resources to attract students, and distance education may certainly play a more important role by then, said Tan Songhua, vice-president of the Chinese Society of Education,

In a ten-year outline on China' s education reform and development issued earlier this year, China said it would build a life-long learning society by the end of 2020.

Statistics from the Ministry of Education indicate that the distance education network had covered 90 percent of the junior middle schools and 80 percent of the primary schools in China's rural areas by the end of 2007, thanks to a government investment of 11.1 billion yuan (US$1.67 billion).

(Xinhua News Agency November 12, 2010)