Distance Education in China

Ding, X.

Context:
This selection gives a concise but comprehensive overview of China's national system of distance education, with facts and figures over the last 20 years or so. The case of China's radio and TV universities is specifically dealt with, as it plays the role of infrastructure, providing the nation with distance education courses and programs.

Source:
Ding, X. 1999. "Distance education in China," In Keith Harry (ed.) Higher Education through Open and Distance Learning: World Review of Distance Education and Open Learning, London: Routledge and COL.

Copyright:
Reproduced with permission.

China has a triple national system of distance higher education, consisting of correspondence education, radio and TV education and state examinations for self-study (Ding 1994a, 1996). Except in case of four independent correspindence colleges, correspondence education mainly offered by regular higher education institutions and is recognised as dual-mode provision, has been identified as the largest of today's eleven mega universities (daniel 1996). The state examinations for self-study system has been classified as a 'quasi-mode' provision because it is really a state examinations system and not institutionalised educationwith full teaching, learning suport and student management functions (Ding 1995, 1996). Concerning the funding mechanism of China's higher education sector, most regular higher education institutions are funded by national budget at central and provincial levels. However, for distance higher education (e.g. the RTVUs), there are four quite different sources of funding: governmental funding (51.6 per cent of the total funding) (at three levels : central --3.6 per cent, provincial -- 20.3 per cent and local -- 2.7 per cent); funding from various organisations, mainly work units (40.0 per cent); funding from students themselves or their families through student fees (5.1 per cent); and a mix of other sources (3.3 per cent). (the figures came from an evaluation project conducted at the end of 1980s, see Ding 1994b.) Concerning educational cost, various researchers in the 1980s (ding 1994b) have shown that the average institutional cost of the RTVUs, including all fixed costs consumed by RTVUs and broadcasting organisations at various levels and variable costs consumed by TV classes in both recurrent expenditure and capital depreciation, was only about one-fourth of the average recurrent expenditure of the regular higher education institutions. The on-time graudation rate war more than 70-80 per cent in the RTVUs, so the annual cost per graduate of RTVUs was about one-third to two-fifths of that of the regular higher education institutions (about 30 per cent for humanities, 35 per cent for economics and 40 per cent for sciences and engineering courses respectively) (Ding 1998). From the viewpoint of demographic statistic, there have been some changes in the characteritics of undergraduate students of Hina's RTVUs in the past two decades (see Table 9-2.1). Basic facts and figures about distance higher education in China are shown in Tables 9-2.2 and 9-2.3.

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