China's distance education has had several great development opportunities in history:
The first time was in the early 1960s. At that time, black-and-white TV had just appeared in some central cities in China, and the establishment of TV universities such as Beijing and Shanghai initiated the application of TV media in the world's distance higher education.
The second time was in the late 1970s. After the Cultural Revolution, China urgently needed talents, but the microwave transmission color TV network has begun to take shape in the country. As an important pawn in the development strategy blueprint of China's chief architect of reform and opening up, Deng Xiaoping was far-sighted and personally approved the establishment of the Central Radio and TV University facing China, which enabled China's distance education to seize the historic and significant development opportunity, trained millions of qualified talents for the country, and laid the foundation for China's distance higher education to win a place in China's higher education and lay the foundation for the second generation.
The third time was at the turn of the century. China's social development and economic construction have entered a "prosperous time", information technology has developed rapidly, and education informatization and popularization of higher education have provided new historical opportunities for the development of distance education. The China Municipal Government seized the opportunity to implement the action plan of revitalizing education facing 2 1 century, including the modern distance education project, and the Ministry of Education started the pilot project of modern distance education in 1998. Before and after this, the modern distance education project was also carried out in resources construction, network multimedia teaching information transmission platform construction, quality management, subject research and so on.
In April 2000, the Ministry of Education held the "Experience Exchange Meeting of Modern Distance Education Pilot of the Ministry of Education" in Changsha. On the basis of exchanging and summarizing the pilot experience of modern distance education, this conference focuses on supporting a number of famous universities to build online education colleges and carry out distance education with academic qualifications and non-academic qualifications. Wei Yu, former vice minister of education, pointed out that this meeting is of symbolic significance in the modern distance education project in China. After the meeting, the document of the Ministry of Education (2000, 10) was promulgated and the pilot was fully launched. At present, the number of pilot universities has increased to 68. Judging from the scale and quality of the pilot project, the seminar on quality management of modern distance education held by the Ministry of Education in April 2000 and the cooperation group meeting of modern distance education pilot universities held in July marked that the Ministry of Education started with "positive development and standardized management", strengthened macro-control and guidance on the pilot project of distance education, and promoted the standardized and scientific development of this new thing.