Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Jiang Su, one of the best developed coast provinces in China has launched a qualification process over all distance education service providers across the province in the new year. 282 high education DE&T sites were examined and 18 got terminated. The disqualified service providers and the ones are pending for the qualification are not allowed to enroll students and advertise about the service within the province.

It's good to see there is some type of qualification acts being initialized for the over-whelmed and crowded distance education market in China. There are hundreds of high education institutions across the country and almost every single one of them have an independent, self-funded DE&T unit. However, on the other hand, most of the university and colleges don't have any technology aided learning platform for the face to face learnings. Online studies has been driven by pure profit in China for years. But here are the un-answered questions: who should be the agency to provide the qualifications? What evaluation procedures are taken in the process? How to prevent GuanXi (relationship) corruption being factored into the process?